“Get a hot iron, Christina,” cried David, and gripped Paul with his knees.

In the morning the room was wild and grisly with blood and the smell of burnt flesh, and David lay face downwards on the floor, writhing as the echoes of Paul’s shrieks tortured his ears.  But in the next room little Paul was still for ever, and all the ghostly labor was to no purpose.

I suppose there is some provision in the make of humanity for overflow grief, some limit impregnable to affliction; for when little Paul was laid beside his brother, there were still David and Christina to walk aimlessly in their empty world.  Their scars were deep, and they were crippled with woe, and it seemed to them they lived as paralytics live, dead in all save in their susceptibility to torture.  Moreover, there was a barrier between them in David’s disastrous foreknowledge, for Christina could not throw off the thought that it contained the causal elements which had robbed her of her sons.  Pain had fogged her; she could not probe the matter, and sensations tyrannised over her mind.  David, too, was bowed with a sense of guilt that he could not rise to throw off.  All motive was buried in the kraal; and he and his wife sat apart and spent days and nights without the traffic of speech.

But Christina was seized with an idea.  She woke David in the night and spoke to him tensely.

“David,” she cried, gripping him by the arm.  “David!  We cannot live for ever.  Do you hear me?  Look, David, look hard!  Look where you looked before.  Can you see nothing for me—­for us, David?”

He was sitting up, and the spell of her inspiration claimed him.  He opened his eyes wide and searched the barren darkness for a sign.  He groped with his mind, tore at the bonds of the present.

“Do you see nothing?” whispered Christina.  “Oh, David, there must be something.  Look—­look hard!”

For the space of a hundred seconds they huddled on the bed, David fumbling with the keys of destiny, Christina waiting, breathless.

“Lie down,” said David at last.  “You are going to die, little cousin.  It is all well.”  His voice was the calmest in the world.  “And you!” cried Christina; “David, and you?”

“I see nothing,” he said.

“Poor David!” murmured his wife, clinging to him.  “But I am sure all will yet be well, David.  Have no fear, my husband.”

She murmured on in the dark, with his arm about her, and promised him death, entreated him to believe with her, and coaxed him with the bait of the grave.  They were bride and groom again, they two, and slept at last in one another’s arms.

In the morning all was well with Christina, and she bustled about as of old.  David was still, and hoped ever, with a tired content in what should happen, a languor that forbade him from railing on fate.  Together they prepared matters as for a journey.

“If the black trousers come frayed again,” said Christina, “try to remember that the scissors are better than a knife.  And the seeds are all in the box under our bed.”