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 frame a coherent question with his pale frightened lips:  “you don’t—­you can’t think—­”

“That he’s dying?  He won’t see another sun rise.”

“But do they—­do they—­in there—­understand?”

“Oh for them,” said Lawrence with his bitter ironical smile, “he died five minutes ago.”

This then was the end.  Waiting in the autumn twilight with Val’s head on his arm Lawrence tried to retrace the steps by which it had been reached.  Bernard’s revenge had struck blind and wild as revenge is apt to strike, but it had helped to bring the wheel full circle.  Val’s expiation was complete.  In his heart Lawrence knew that his own was complete also.  In breaking Val’s life he had permanently scarred his own.

And the night when it had all begun came back to him, a March night, quiet and dark but for the periodical fanbeam of an enemy searchlight from the slope of an opposite hill:  a mild rain had been falling, falling, ceaselessly, plashingly, over muddy ploughland or sere grass, over the intricacy of trenchwork behind the firing lines and the dreary expanse of no man’s land between them:  falling over wire entanglements from which dangled rags of uniform and rags of flesh:  falling on faces of the unburied dead that it was helping to dissolve into, their primal pulp of clay.  War! always war! and no theatre of scarlet and gold and cavalry charges, but a rat’s war of mud and cold and fleas and unutterable, nerve-dissolving fatigue.  Not far off occasionally the rustle of clothes or the tinkle of an entrenching tool, as a sleeper turned over or the group sentry shifted arms on the parapet; and always in a lulling undertone the plash of rain on grass or wire, and the heavy breathing of tired men.  For four years these nocturnal sounds of war had been familiar in the ears of Lawrence Hyde.  He could hear them now, the river-murmur repeated them.  And then as now he had taken young Stafford’s head on his arm, the boy lying as he had lain for eighteen hours, immovable, the rain running down over his face and through his short fair hair.