Pink was angry.  She could hear his voice, see his gestures.  He was shooing them off like a lot of chickens, and they were laughing.  The game had stopped, and the side lines were pressing forward.  There was a moment’s debate, with raised voices, a sullen muttering from the crowd, and the line closing into a circle.  The last thing she saw before it closed was a man lunging at Pink, and his counter-feint.  Then some one was down.  If it was Pink he was not out, for there was fighting still going on.  The laborers working on the grounds were running.

Lily stood up in the car, pale and sickened.  She was only vaguely conscious of a car that suddenly left the road, and dashed recklessly across the priceless turf, but she did see, and recognize, Louis Akers as he leaped from it and flinging men this way and that disappeared into the storm center.  She could hear his voice, too, loud and angry, and see the quick dispersal of the crowd.  Some of the men, foreigners, passed quite near to her, and eyed her either sullenly or with mocking smiles.  She was quite oblivious of them.  She got out and ran with shaking knees across to where Pink lay on the grass, his profile white and sharply chiseled, with two or three men bending over him.

Pink was dead.  Those brutes had killed him.  Pink.

He was not dead.  He was moving his arms.

Louis Akers straightened when he saw her and took off his hat.

“Nothing to worry about, Miss Cardew,” he said.  “But what sort of idiocy—!  Hello, old man, all right now?”

Pink sat up, then rose stiffly and awkwardly.  He had a cut over one eye, and he felt for his handkerchief.

“Fouled me,” he said.  “Filthy lot, anyhow.  Wonder they didn’t walk on me when I was down.”  He turned to the grounds-keeper, who had come up.  “You ought to know better than to let those fellows cut up this turf,” he said angrily.  “What’re you here for anyhow?”

But he was suddenly very sick.  He looked at Lily, his face drawn and blanched.

“Got me right,” he muttered.  “I—­”

“Get into my car,” said Akers, not too amiably.  “I’ll drive you to the stables.  I’ll be back, Miss Cardew.”

Lily went back to the car and sat down.  She was shocked and startled, but she was strangely excited.  The crowd had beaten Pink, but it had obeyed Louis Akers like a master.  He was a man.  He was a strong man.  He must be built of iron.  Mentally she saw him again, driving recklessly over the turf, throwing the men to right and left, hoarse with anger, tall, dominant, powerful.

It was more important that a man be a man than that he be a gentleman.

After a little he drove back across the field, sending the car forward again at reckless speed.  Some vision of her grandfather, watching the machine careening over the still soft and spongy turf and leaving deep tracks behind it, made her smile.  Akers leaped out.