Without speaking, she passed him and approached the prostrate figure and knelt beside it on the mud floor. At her touch Holman stirred, groaned once, and sat up. He stared about him wildly, and, seeing Matheson, caught at Honor's dress as though for protection, and shrank further away. Matheson stood and surveyed their grouping with a numb sensation of utter weariness stealing over him. He was too physically used up even to think connectedly. Holman was choking and spluttering. He caught his breath on a sob, and turned his face and spat noisily on the floor. Doubtless he felt a necessity for expectorating; but the act appealed to Matheson as disgusting, and unseemly in Honor's presence. He expected her to wince. Observing that she made no sign of repugnance, he wondered whether her compassion exceeded her fastidiousness; and felt vaguely disappointed in her for showing so great a forbearance. Very gently she loosened the injured man's collar, and assisted him to an easier position, tending him with such solicitude that Matheson, watching her in surprised silence, was moved to a yet greater hatred of the man whose life her coming had spared. Could she be so completely dominated by racial antagonism as to be dead to every other consideration? It seemed to him that the tragedy of her mother's life, the division between the Nels, who in every respect save their sense of right in allegiance to opposite causes, were fraternal in feeling, could not fail to have some effect on her. He could not understand her attitude of unrelenting enmity. Even allowing that from her point of view his country had done her people a real injury in the past, surely she must realise that in this struggle for right against tyranny, every country which spent its strength in the defence of the weaker nations was to be honoured for the sacrifices it was called upon to make? For any injustice Great Britain had been guilty of in the past she was making a splendid atonement. While he pondered these things, dizzy from the effects of his wound and the recent struggle, Honor rose to her feet and confronted him with so kindly a look that he was led to believe that her solicitude for Holman went no deeper than a womanly compassion which any suffering would excite--which she might have shown towards himself had his condition seemed to call for sympathy. She had not observed that he was hurt. In the gathering dusk the blood that was soaking through his coat showed only as a dark stain which passed unremarked in the agitation of the moment. "Go," she said in a quiet voice, and lifted an arm and pointed towards the open doorway. "Your presence excites him. You have hurt him. What had he done to you that you should seek to kill him?" "Honor!" he said, and hardly recognised his own voice, so hoarse and strange it sounded in the stillness. He made a step towards her, gazing hungrily into the beautiful, upraised face. "Honor!" he repeated dully.