When Sally’s inert body fell, crushing him against the window recess, he looked down at her white face in the first realization of what he had done.  Then he came readily to action; picked her up bodily—­a tender, listless weight.  In the bend of his arms, he carried her into the other room.  An uncushioned settle, no springs, the seat of plain wood, was where he laid her, propping her head, because he knew no better, with a pillow which he brought from the inner room.  The sounds from the yard at the back still reached his ears.  He strode through to the window and closed it; brought back with him a glass of water, and stood beside the settle, looking down at the slowly disappearing pallor of her face.  Her hat was crushed against the pillow as she lay; he sought with blind and clumsy fingers for the hat pins, extracting them gently, with infinite slowness, as though they were fastened in the flesh.  When it was free, he took the hat away and laid it on the table.  Then he stood again and watched her.  She looked asleep.  The loosened hair clustered over her ears—­soft silk of gold; his hands touched it.  Where a few curls fell out, and the candle-light struck through them, the hair was pale yellow—­champagne held up to the sun.

Presently, he picked up her hand, the arm hanging a dead weight from her shoulder, the knuckles touching the floor.  His fingers closed over the pulse to find it faintly beating.  He had been a fool to let her stand there and watch the fight.  He might have known.  The thought thrust itself into his mind that he would like to meet the woman who could watch the whole thing out, take the lust of it as he did.  She might be worth while.  But this child—­she was nothing more than a child—­who fainted at the sight of blood; he felt a tenderness for her.  Looking down at her as she lay on the settle before him, he could not conceive himself actually doing her harm.  She had called him a gentleman.  It seemed as if that stray phrase of hers had taken away all the sting of the desire.  She expected him to act as a gentleman; then her expectations should be fulfilled to the letter.  The woman who moved him to the deepest force of his nature, was she who knew the brute, not the gentleman in him, and bowed herself in supine submission.  And as he stood and watched her there, slowly creeping back through the faintest tinges of colour to consciousness, he little imagined that Sally was the very woman who would so yield herself rather than lose him from her life.

At last she opened her eyes, the dazed, wondering stare that comes after the period of forced unconsciousness.

“Where—­where am I?” she whispered.

“Here—­my rooms—­you fainted.”

“Fainted?  Why?”

“I don’t know;” he knelt down beside her, all tenderness and apology.  “The fight, I suppose; we were looking on at that fight outside, at the back.  I never thought—­I was a brute—­it never entered my head for a moment.  Here, take a sip of this water, while I go and get you some brandy.”