Thought is free:  one may be at a man’s mercy and in his debt and keep one’s own opinion of him, impersonal and cold.  With a faint smile on his lips Val got up and strolled over to the piano.  “Hullo, what’s all this music lying about?” he said in his ordinary manner.  “Has Laura been playing?  Good, I’m so glad:  Bernard can hardly ever stand it.  See the first fruits of your bracing influence!  Oh, the Polonaises . . .”  And then he in his turn began to play, but not the melancholy fiery lyrics that had soothed Laura’s unsatisfied heart.  Val, a thorough musician, went for sympathy to the classics.  Impulsive?  There was not much impulse left in this quiet, reticent man, who with his old trouble fresh on him could sit down and play a chorale of Bach or a prelude of Mozart, subordinating his own imperious anguish to the grave universal daylight of the elder masters.  Long since Val had resolved that no shadow from him should fall across any other life.  He had foresworn “that impure passion of remorse,” and so keen an observer as Rowsley had grown up in his intimacy without suspecting anything wrong.  Unfortunately for Val, however, he still suffered, though he was now denied all expression, all relief:  the wounded mind bled inwardly.  It was no wonder Val’s hair was turning grey.

Lawrence, no mean judge of music, understood much—­not all—­of the significance of Val’s playing.  He was an imaginative man—­ far more so than Val, who would have lived an ordinary life and travelled on ordinary lines of thought but for the war, which wrenched so many men out of their natural development.  But it was again unfortunate for Val that the sporting instinct ran strong in Captain Hyde.  He was irritated by Val’s grave superior dignity, and deep and unacknowledged there was working in him the instinct of the bully, the love of cruelty, overlaid by layer on layer of civilization, of chivalry, of decency, yet native to the human heart and quick to reassert itself at any age:  in the boy who thrashes a smaller boy, in the young man who takes advantage of a woman, in the fighter who hounds down surrendered men.

He settled himself in a chair close to the piano.  “Val, I’m very glad to have met you.  Having taken so much upon me,” he was smiling into Val’s eyes, “I’ve often wondered what had become of you.  This,” he lightly touched Val’s arm, “was a cruel handicap.  I had to disable you, but it need not have been permanent.”

“Do you mind moving? you’re in my light.”

He shifted his chair by an inch or so.  “After all, what’s a single failure of nerve?  Physical causes—­wet, cold, indigestion, tight puttees—­account for nine out of ten of these queer breakdowns.  At all events you’ve paid, Val, paid twice over:  when I read your name in the Honours List I laughed, but I was sorry for you.  The sword-and-epaulets business would have been mild compared to that.”

“Cat and mouse, is it?” said Val, resting his hands on the keys.