So we came back, and, ah! my heart was sore, for I loved the lad as though he had indeed been my son.

But I knew that he was dead, and there was an end.
"Where is my brother ?" cried Nada when we came back.
"Lost," I answered.

"Lost, never to be found again." Then the girl gave a great and bitter cry, and fell to the earth saying, "I would that I were dead with my brother!" "Let us be going," said Macropha, my wife.
"Have you no tears to weep for your son ?" asked a man of our company.
"What is the use of weeping over the dead?
Does it, then, bring them back ?" she answered.

"Let us be going!" The man thought these words strange, but he did not know that Umslopogaas was not born of Macropha.
Still, we waited in that place a day, thinking that, perhaps, the lioness would return to her den and that, at least, we might kill her.
But she came back no more.

So on the next morning we rolled up our blankets and started forward on our journey, sad at heart.