irrespective of
his deserts. There was much of the wife but more of the mother
in the way she covered him with her arms and breast. "No one
shall touch you, no one. It was only an accident, you never
meant it, and besides Val's only a little hurt--"

Val, still with that wrenched grimace of pain, turned round and
leant against Lawrence. "Get me out of this," he said weakly.
"Invent some story. Anything, but spare her. Get me out, I'm
going to faint."

Between them, Lawrence and Selincourt carried him out and laid
him on the steps. No one else paid any attention. Laura was
taken up with Bernard. Mr. Stafford had shuffled over to the
fire and was stooping down to warm his fingers while Isabel tried
brokenly to soothe the anguish from which old and tired hearts
rarely recover. She was more frightened for him than for Val,
and the grief she felt for him was a grief outside herself, which
could be pitied and comforted, whereas the blow that had fallen
on Val seemed to have fallen on her own life also, withering
where it struck. She suffered for her father but with Val, and
this intensity of communion hardened her into steel, for it
seemed as weak and vain to pity him as it would have been to pity
herself if she like him had fallen under the stress of war. The
weak must first be served--later, later there would be time to
pity the strong.

She did not realize that for Val, whom instinctively she still
classed among the strong, time and opportunity were over. He
fainted before they got him out into the air, and his hand fell
away from his side, and then they saw what was wrong. He had
been stabbed: stabbed with the Persian dagger that Lawrence
himself had given Bernard. Val had taken it under his left
breast, and it was buried to its delicate hilt. When Lawrence
opened his coat and shirt there was scarcely any blood flowing:
scarcely any sign of mischief except his leaden pallor and the
all-but-cessation of his pulse. "Internal haemorrhage," said
Lawrence. He drew out the weapon, which came forth with a slow
sidelong wrench of its curved blade: a gush of blood followed,
running down over Val's shirt, over his shabby coat, over the
steps of Wanhope and the dry autumn turf. Lawrence held the lips
of the wound together with his hand. "Go and find Verney, will
you? Mind, it was an accident. Don't be drawn into giving any
details. We must all stick to the same story."

"But--but" Selincourt could not