"You want to kill me," he said in a struggling voice, "because of what I've done to Janey--but I tell you it's been a blessing to her as well as to me. We were both in the mud together, and now I've got out it'll be easier for her to do so." "You've blighted her with your damned love!" cried Leonard incoherently, "she's half dead, she's in the mud, she's in hell. When you got out, as you call it, you kicked her deeper in." "But there's no good killing me for it." "Why?" Len asked the question almost lamely. He felt giddy and inert, and Quentin's words seemed to be trickling past him somehow--it was a strange feeling he could not quite realise. "Why?--because you'll probably be hanged for it, and that won't do your sister any good. Besides"--and here his voice quickened suddenly into passion--"you've no right to kill me for grasping my only chance of salvation." "Damn your salvation!--I'm not going to kill you for getting out of the ditch, but for dragging her into it--Janey, my sister, whose shoes you aren't worthy to clean." Lowe quailed for a moment. Furlonger's eyes were blazing, and he crouched back as if for a spring. "There's no good gassing about it," he said thickly, "if I let you talk, you'll talk me stupid. I'm going to wring your neck because you dragged my Janey into your own beastly hell, and then when you saw the chance, climbed out over her shoulders, and left her to rot there. She's ill, I tell you--she's half dead--and I'm going to kill you for it." Quentin flung a last imploring look at the silent fields with their waving, whispering grass. The clouds were scattering now, and the sky blazed with stars. The night was full of the scent of hay.... In a moment they would be lost in a black, choking whirl, that sky, those stars--that sweet smell of hay. He sniffed at it. He thought of the huge mown meadow by Shovelstrode, where only yesterday he and Tony had lounged and played. He heard the voices of the workers, as they turned the great swathes, and shook them on their forks, filling the air with fragrance; he saw Tony in a muslin frock, with the white rose he had given her in her breast. He saw the sun on the coils of her mouse-coloured hair--heard her say some little, trivial, slangy thing that had somehow made him kiss her. He remembered that kiss, so sweet, so cool, so calm--and, as he drew back his head, the look of her innocent eyes.... But once more the thought of Tony put courage into him. If he must die inside the gates of Paradise, he would die worthily of the woman who had opened them to him. For her sake he would die game--it was the only thing he had left to do for her now. He would die with a proud face and a high courage--and his last conscious thought should be of Tony, who, if only for a few short days, had allowed him to see what love can be when it comes in white. He braced himself up, flung back his shoulders, and waited for the attack. It came.