Lot Hardacre gave a sharp, savage cry, faltered, and fell back two steps. His sword wavered helplessly in the air, his knees bent under him. Both Beaty and Wilson ran to catch him as he staggered and sank. The sword fell from his relaxed fingers. Jeffray, shocked at the sight of this strong man’s agony of defeat, threw his sword away, and bent over his cousin in generous distress. “How is it with you, Lot?” “A good quittance, and be damned to you.” Bob Beaty knelt supporting Lot’s shoulders and pressing his hand over the frothing wound in the man’s chest. “My God,” he said, “what fools! We brought no surgeon.” Jeffray, who was looking down at his cousin with mute regret, turned suddenly, and, picking up Lot’s gaudy waistcoat, doubled it into a pad and thrust it into Beaty’s hand. “Hold it over the wound,” he said; “we must get him into the coach. Drive to Stott’s house at Rookhurst. Quick, Dick, take his shoulders.” Between them they lifted Lot Hardacre, gray-faced and bloody, weak as a sick child, and carried him up the stairway along the terrace to the coach. A frightened and shaking serving-man opened the coach door. They lifted Lot in as gently as they could, and laid him along the seat with his head resting against Bob Beaty’s shoulder. The serving-man slammed the door and climbed up to the seat behind the coach. The postilion whipped up his horses, and the clumsy carriage swung away on its great springs, leaving Jeffray and Dick Wilson watching it side by side from the terrace. XXXIX The anger had melted out of Jeffray’s heart from the moment that he had helped to lift his cousin’s body and bear it with Beaty and Wilson to the coach. The reaction was but the recoiling of a sensitive nature from the violence that had brought a strong man in anguish to the ground. He stood watching the coach as it rolled along between the trees casting up a cloud of summer dust that drifted idly over the long grass. Wilson, understanding something of the regret that had seized upon his friend’s mind, laid his hand upon Jeffray’s shoulder. “It was no fault of yours, Richard,” he said, looking earnestly into Jeffray’s face. The younger man hung his head and sighed. “He forced the quarrel on me, Dick.” “And what is more, sir, he had no intention of showing you much mercy. You cannot blame yourself for the poor devil’s fury.” Jeffray turned at last and remembered Bess. He had almost forgotten her in the fierce emotions of the moment, and in the vision of Lot lying bleeding on the grass. She was still kneeling on the stone bench at the end of the terrace, her elbows on the balustrading, her face between her hands. Wilson’s eyes were also fixed upon this solitary figure, suggesting in its bleak aloofness some tragic influence working silently upon the unfolding of the play. The painter glanced inquiringly at Jeffray, nor was the significance of the look lost upon his friend. “I can trust you, Dick,” he said.