ould have been an inveterate smoker, but
good Egyptians were a luxury which he could not often afford
The Wanhope agency was ample for his needs, though underpaid as
agencies go: but there was Rowsley, always hard up, uncomplaining,
but sensitive, as a young fellow in his position is sure to be, and
secretly fretting because he could not do as other men did: and there
was Isabel, for whom Val felt the anxiety Mr. Stafford ought to have
felt, and was trying to make the provision Mr. Stafford ought to have
made: and then there was the vicar himself, who laid out a great deal
of money in those investments for which we are promised cent per cent
interest, but upon a system of deferred payment.

Tonight however Val lit a cigarette, and then a second, to the
surprise of Isabel, who saw the red spark on the lawn. She
thought her brother must be tired, and perhaps it really was the
long day without food that made him so restless in mind and so
uneasy. Bernard Clowes had been more than usually cranky that
afternoon. Even the patient Val had had thoughts of throwing up
his job when the cripple made him go through his week's accounts,
scrutinizing every entry and cross-examining him on every
transaction in such a tone as the head of a firm might employ to
a junior clerk suspected of dishonesty. It was Bernard's way:
it meant nothing: but it was irksome to Val, especially when he
could not soothe himself by dropping into Laura's quiet parlour
for a cup of tea. Yet his irritation would not have lingered
through a cigarette if Isabel's news had not revived it. This
cousin of Bernard's! Val had not much faith in any cousin of
Bernard Clowes: nor in the kindness of life.

Val was a slight, fair, pleasant-looking man of eight or nine and
twenty, quiet of movement, friendly-mannered and as inconspicuous
as his own rather worn grey tweeds: one of a class, till he
raised his eyes: and then? There was something strange in Val's eyes
when they were fully raised, an indrawn arresting brilliance
difficult to analyse: imaginative and sympathetic, as if he were at
home in dark places: the quality of acceptance of pain.

Adepts in old days knew by his eyes a man who had been on the
rack. Stafford had been racked: and by the pain that is half
shame, the keenest, the most lacerating and destructive of
wounds. He had suffered till he could suffer no more, and
tonight in the starlit garden he, suffered still, without hope,
or rebellion