And she drowned before my eyes while I stood like a stone." There was an awful pause.

He had told me the end of the tragedy so swiftly and in a voice so keyed to the terror of the scene, that I lay horror-stricken, unable to speak.

He buried his face in his hands, and between the fleshy part of the palms I saw the muscles of his lips twitch horribly.

I remembered, with a shiver, how I had first seen them twitch, in his mother's house, when he had made his strange, almost passionate apology for fear.

And he had all but described this very incident: the reckless, hare-brained devil standing on the bank of a river and letting a wounded comrade drown.