“Well, I think you’ve had about enough for once,” soliloquized Philip, as he critically surveyed the writhing mass on the ground before him; and he looked a very handsome lad as he said it.

His curly black hair hung in waving confusion over his forehead, and flung changing lights and shadows into the depths of his brown eyes, whilst his massive and somewhat heavy features were touched into a more active life by the light of that pleasing excitement which animates nine men out of every ten of the Anglo-Saxon race when they are engaged on killing or hurting some other living creature.  The face, too, had a certain dignity about it, a little of the dignity of justice; it was the face of one who feels that if his action has been precipitate and severe, it has at any rate been virtuous.  The full but clear-cut lips also had their own expression on them, half serious, half comical; humour, contempt, and even pity were blended in it.  Altogether Philip Caresfoot’s appearance in the moment of boyish vengeance was pleasing and not uninteresting.

Presently, however, something of the same change passed over his face that we see in the sky when a cloud passes over the sun; the light faded out of it.  It was astonishing to note how dull and heavy—­ay, more, how bad it made him look all in a breath.

“There will be a pretty business about this,” he murmured, and then, administering a sharp kick to the prostrate and groaning form on the ground before him, he said, “Now, then, get up; I’m not going to touch you again.  Perhaps, though, you won’t be in quite such a hurry to tell lies about me another time, though I suppose that one must always expect a certain amount of lying from a half-bred beggar like you.  Like mother, like son, you know.”

This last sentence was accompanied by a bitter laugh, and produced a decided effect on the grovelling George, who slowly raised himself upon his hands, and, lifting his head, looked his cousin full in the face.

It was not the ghastly appearance of his mangled and blood-soaked countenance that made Philip recoil so sharply from the sight of his own handiwork—­he had fought too often at school to be chicken-hearted about a little bloodshed; and, besides, he knew that his cousin was only knocked about, not really injured—­but rather the intense and almost devilish malignity of the expression that hovered on the blurred features and in the half-closed eyes.  But no attempt was made by George to translate the look into words, and indeed Philip felt that it was untranslatable.  He also felt dimly that the hate and malice with which he was regarded by the individual at his feet was of a more concentrated and enduring character than most men have the power to originate.  In the lurid light of that one glance he was able, though he was not very clever, to pierce the darkest recesses of his cousin’s heart, and to see his inmost thought, no longer through a veil, but face to face.  And what he saw was sufficient to make the blood leave his ruddy cheek, and to fix his eyes into an expression of fear.