Waldo felt a qualm, yet the face and form still swayed his horrified sympathy for their humanness.
“Do you shoot women because they have long teeth?” Waldo insisted, revolted at the horrid death he had watched.
“You are hard to convince,” said the consul sternly. “Do you call that a woman?”
He stripped the clothing from the carcass.
Waldo sickened all over. What he saw was not the front of a woman, but the body of a female animal, old and flaccid—mother of a pack.
“What kind of a creature is it?” he asked faintly.
“A Ghoul, my boy,” the consul answered solemnly, almost in a whisper.
“I thought they did not exist,” Waldo babbled. “I thought they were mythical; I thought there were none.”
“I can very well believe that there are none in Rhode Island,” the consul said gravely. “This is in Persia, and Persia is in Asia.”
Calderon stopped abruptly in the middle of that long road across the moor. Something had caught his eye as he walked—the slightest possible glitter at the side of the road, where the heavy sunlight was making even the stones throw tiny, dense shadows. He went back a step, intent upon discovering what it was that had disturbed his casual glance. There, half raised by a small mound of hardened dust, was a ring, a plain silver ring, the sight of which struck him as a dagger might have done. As he picked it gently from the roadway, and dusted it with his handkerchief, his fingers trembled. It was his wife’s ring. He had given it to her before their marriage, a memento of an exquisitely happy day. All the time they had been together she had worn it constantly: there had never been a time when she had not borne it upon her finger. The ring was full of memories for him—of memories that were painful now in their happiness because they belonged to a broken time. And these memories pressed upon his heart, stabbing him, as he stood thoughtfully in the roadway among the purple heather, gazing at the ring. His face had grown quite gray and hard, and his eyes were troubled.
For a moment he could do nothing but gaze at the ring, busy with his urgent thoughts. He could not yet wonder how the ring had come there, upon this lonely road from dale to dale. Behind him the road was white, narrowing through the heather, unshadowed by any tree. To right and left of him the moor stretched in purple masses until it darkened at the sky line. In front, the road began already to decline for the steep descent into Wensleydale. The grass could be seen ahead of him; and beyond it, far in the burning mist of the late afternoon, he saw gleaming, like quicksilver, a sheet of water. The wind came at that great height in powerful gusts, freshening the air, pressing warmly against his face and hands as pleasantly as water presses against the swimmer. No other person was in sight upon the moor: he was alone, with Evelyn’s ring in his hand, and poignant memories assailing him.