The Carissima

"I needn't go into details, Hammond," Leversedge said. "That camp was dead. Even in the night, which decently hides a good deal, it was a ghastly place. I suppose they'd all died of thirst, they and the oxen. And I had fever on me. I shall never know quite all I did see. But in one of the wagons I made out a dead woman. Underneath it a dog was tied, a small, yellowish cur, the only thing left alive, and it yapped. And -- and -- there had been a child in the wagon, a little baby-child -- and I suppose it had lived longer than the rest. And it must have crawled out over the tail of the wagon, and fallen close to the dog. . . ."
The image of that dog came to haunt Leversedge -- and in the end, when he was married (and happy, he thought), it came to rule his life. In the end, it would destroy him.