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, or defence.

Indoors Rowsley and Isabel, with the rapidity of long use, laid
the cloth, and Isabel fetched cold beef from the larder and
butter and eggs from the dairy, while Rowsley went down the
cellar with a jug and a candle and drew from the cask a generous
allowance of beer. "Come along in, old Val," said Isabel,
reappearing at the open window, "You and Rose are both famishing
and I'm not," this was a pious fiction, "so you can begin and
I'll wait for Jimmy. I dare say he's gone wandering off