A torrent of mad words gathered in his throat, but they choked him, and in the pause his will asserted itself.

He became cool and deliberate.
"You are right, my girl, I have sucked the orange and thrown the skin away, and I've picked flowers and cast them by, but that was before the first day I saw you as you now are.

You were standing by the Sagalac looking out to the west where the pack-trains were travelling into the sun over the mountains, and you had your hand on the neck of your pony.
I was not ten feet away from you, behind a juniper-bush.

I looked at you, and I wished that I had never seen a woman before and could look at the world as you did then--it was like water from a spring, that look.
You are right in what you say.

By long and by last I had a hard hand, and when I left what I'd struck down I never looked back.