"I've a feeling I should like to speak of it. I've never explained my motive--no one would understand, or sympathise with it, if I did. In your place, reversing the circumstances, I should feel as you do about it. But when a man has been kicked out of the Service for cowardice, there's something he owes to himself as well as to his country. I had to prove my nature for my own satisfaction. If they'd given me a chance in the ranks I shouldn't have fought for the Boers. But I had to face the bullets again... I had to disprove for my personal satisfaction that quality of unaccountable fear that forced me to retreat in a dangerous and important crisis. God knows what sudden and uncontrolled impulse governed me on that occasion! ... I experienced that same cold terror once again when, unarmed, I faced one of my own Tommies with a fixed bayonet in his hand. I can feel the horror of that terror now-- the mad and well-nigh uncontrollable impulse to turn my back and run. But the motive that had led me to join the fighting proved stronger than my fear. I went for him with my hands; and the horror left me, as a nightmare terror leaves a sleeper when he wakes... That is the history of this scar on my face." He paused, pressed his hand to his brow as if weary, and then resumed with a sort of dogged determination to justify himself,--to make these two people, who both in their hearts he knew condemned utterly what he had felt to be a legitimate means of correcting a base tendency before it became confirmed in him as an incorrigible fault, understand in a sense,--see and feel with him. It mattered to him so tremendously, the opinion of these two silent listeners, the one who sat with crossed knees, watching him intently, the other with her troubled eyes downcast, looking upon the ground. And both, he felt, judging him,--condemning him. "You'll think it at one with the rest, no doubt," he said; "but I don't regret the thing I did which all Englishmen abhor. I know now that I can face death without flinching. I conquered fear. The knowledge gives me all the satisfaction necessary to qualify the odium of the term traitor. It's not the right way to look at the matter, perhaps; but that's how it is." "It's not the right spirit--no?" The Colonel spoke gruffly. "No man is justified in sacrificing honour and duty to his own ends. I recognise that your object was not altogether unworthy. But as a soldier you had no choice." Mrs Lawless looked up in silent appeal at the speaker. Then abruptly she rose and stood with her back to the room, facing the window. Lawless rose also. His face was grey, and the skin seemed to have tightened over the bones as it does after a sharp or a long illness. Colonel Grey had seen men look as he did who had fallen on the field; he had seen them too, lots of them, in hospital.