Val lit a cigarette, a rare indulgence.  If cigarettes grew on gooseberry bushes Val would 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, 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 somewhere and won’t be in till ten.”