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Some brute now was raising his foot and kicking the bare flesh! Instantly the world was on flame for Olva. Now again, as once in Sannet Wood, he must hit and hit with all his soul. He broke, like a madman, into the heart of the crowd, sending it flying. There were cries and screams. He was conscious of three faces. There was Bunning there, white, staring.
And here, in the heart of the Sannet Wood, is death from violence, death, naked, crude, removed from all sense of life as we know it. Amongst the lower order those wild and turbulent undergraduates it is the only topic. Carfax is very generally known; he had ridden, he had rowed, he had played cricket.
It seemed to him an old, old story this tale of a murder in Sannet Wood. Groups of men were waiting in the cloisters, waiting for the doors to open for "Hall." As Olva came towards the gates an undergraduate, white, breathless, brushed past him and burst into the quiet, murmuring groups. "My God, have you heard?" Olva passed through the iron gates. The groups broke.
"But it gives me now," her voice was almost triumphant, "something to share with you, something to help you in, something to fight with you. Now I can show you how much I love you. "How could you have supposed that I would mind? Do you think that a woman, if she loves a man, cares for anything that he may do? If you had killed a hundred men in Sannet Wood I would have helped you to bury them.
"They've just brought his body in now, found it in Sannet Wood this evening; a working man found it. Been there two days. His neck broken " The mysterious groups scattered into strange fantastic shapes. There was a pause and then a hundred voices began at once. Some one spoke to Olva and he answered; his voice low and stern. . . . On every side confusion.
For a moment these clouds, piled in mountain shape of an intense whiteness with round curving edges, held his eyes because they exactly resembled those clouds that had hung above him on the day of his walk to Sannet Wood the day when he had been caught by the snowstorm. These clouds brooded, waiting above him; their dazzling white had the effect of a steady, unswerving gaze. They lined out.
"Ah, I shouldn't wonder nasty-sort-o'-looking feller. And that Sannet Wood too nasty lonely place with its old stones and all comfortable? I don't think." Olva made inquiries as to the stones. "Why, ever so old, they say before Christ, I've 'eard. Used to cut up 'uman flesh and eat it like the pore natives, and there's a ugly lookin' stone in that very wood where they did it too, or so I've 'eard.
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