I'm down in the mouth to-night--that's a fact." A fine description of sorrow would not have been so eloquent, but exactly what he sorrowed for Alec did not know.

It could hardly be for the death merely.
Alec paced again.

He had made himself an uneven track in the ragged grass.

Had the lineaments of the dead been more clearly seen, death would have had a stronger influence; but even as it was, death, darkness, and solitude had a language of their own, in which the hearts of the two men shared more or less.
At length the American spoke, arresting Alec's walk.
"See here," he said, "if what they say is true--and as far as I know it is--he's got up from being dead _once_ already." The emphasis on the word "once" conveyed the suggestion which had evidently just occurred to him.
"Oh, I know all about _that_ story." Alec spoke with the scorn of superior information, casting off the disagreeable suggestion.

"I was there myself." "You were, were you?
Well, so was I, and I tell you I know no more than babe unborn whether this old gentleman's Cameron or not." Alec's mind was singularly free from any turn for speculative thought.
He intended to bring Bates to see the dead in the morning, and that would decide the matter.