At moments of mighty moral strain men can keep steady eyes and nostrils and mouth and speech; but they cannot control that tell-tale diaphragm of flesh over the heart.

I have known it to cause the death of many a Kaffir spy....
But, at any rate, there was the twitch of the lips ...

I deliberately threw weight into the scale of Mrs.Boyce's foolish question.

If he had not lost his balance, why should he have launched into an almost passionate defence of the physical coward?
My memory went back to the narrative of the poor devil in the Cape Town hospital.

Boyce's description of the general phenomenon was a deadly corroboration of Somers's account of the individual case.