At that he lies content a while, drinking her in with the privileged directness of the sick. What hair! What a beautiful, generous, rather large mouth! What a divine sorrowful pity! What would have become of him, if the likely, the almost certain, had happened, and she _had_ hated him? And Lavinia! He is the first to meet her eyes of the costly wreckage with which the South African storm has strewn the shores of the motherland; he is the comrade for whose life dear brave Bill thought it a small thing to lay down his own; and as she knows that the deed which has stretched him in suffering and weakness before her was as madly gallant as the one by whose means he lived to do it, is it any wonder that she stands in a tranced silence, drinking him in, as he is drinking her? “I felt it very strongly when his father came to see me,” says Binning, presently, still scarcely above his breath, and harking back to the fears he had expressed of being abhorred by his dead friend’s family. “It did him good to talk to you!” After a second or two, “He did not grudge Bill--we none of us did; and it is the very death that Bill himself would have chosen.” “Yes; I know it is.” There is, or she thinks it, a kind of envy in the acquiescent voice. “And we all felt that you would have changed places with him if you could, wouldn’t you?” The surface motive of the speech is the kind and Christian one of bringing comfort to a spirit that she divines to be as sorely wounded as the brave body that holds it; but underneath there lurks another, scarcely known even to herself. It is the question she had put to Rupert two months ago--to Rupert, the unblushing candour of whose answering negative had given her one of those accesses of repulsion towards him, which for the future it will be a crime for her to indulge. A feverish and senseless curiosity prompts her to repeat it now. “Yes, I would.” There is no asseveration to strengthen the assent; yet it carries a conviction as deep--nay, much deeper, for she had tried not to believe the latter--than Rupert’s confession that he would much rather not have died for his brother. Retribution speedily overtakes her, in the sting of sudden pain caused by the contrast she herself has brought out, into salience; and conscious of the unworthiness of her double motive, she finds herself unable to bear the gratitude of his eyes. They are hazel, and have eagleish yellow lights in them, as one part of herself tells another part some time after she has left him.