“Why did you set him to fight?” she said with an indignation which choked her voice.  “It was vile.  He was younger than the other, and knew less.”

Those who had won laughed.  Those who had lost cursed him again; he had disgraced his branca.  They would flay him, and put him in the cauldron over the wood fire, and would curse him even whilst they picked his bones for a white-livered spawn of cowards; a son of a thrice-damned ewe.

The girl knew that was what they do.  She laid his battered head gently down upon the turf, and poured the water out of her cup; her eyes were blind with tears; she could not give him back his young life, his zest in his pastoral pleasures, his joy in cropping the herbage, his rude loves, his merry gambols, his sound sleep, his odorous breath.

He had died to amuse and excite the ugly passions of men, as, if he had lived longer, he would, in the end, have died to satisfy their ugly appetites.

She looked at his corpse with compassion, the tears standing in her eyes; then she turned away, and as she went saw that her poor ragged clothes were splashed here and there with blood, and that her arms and hands were red with blood:  she had not thought of that before; she had thought only of him.  The shepherds did not notice her; they were quarrelling violently in dispute over what had been lost and won, thrusting their fingers in each other’s faces, and defiling the fair calm of the day with filthy oaths.

The girl shrank away into the heather with the silent swiftness of a hare; now that she had lost the stimulus of indignant pity she was afraid of these brutes; if the whim entered into them they would be as brutal to her as to their flock.

Out of fear of them she did not descend at once to the river, but pushed her way through the sweet-smelling, bee-haunted, cross-leaved heaths; she could hear the sound of the water on her right all the time as she went.  She knew little of this country, but she had seen the Edera, and had crossed it farther up its course on one of its rough tree-bridges.

When, as well as she could judge, she had got half a mile away from the scene of the rams’ combat, she changed her course and went to the right, directed by the murmur of the river.  It was slow walking through the heath and gorse which grew above her head, and were closely woven together, but in time she reached shelving ground, and heard the song of the river louder on her ear.  The heath ceased to grow within a few yards of the stream and was replaced by various water plants and acacia thickets; she slid down the banks between the stems and alighted on her bare feet where the sand was soft and the water-dock grew thick.  She looked up and down the water; there was no one in sight, nothing but the banks rosehued with the bloom of the heather, and, beyond the opposite shore, in the distance, the tender amethystine hues of the mountains.  The water was generally low, leaving the stretches of sand and of shingle visible, but it was still deep in many parts.