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Nightfall

by Anthony Pryde · English · Gutenberg #14489 · 529,213 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Nightfall

Author: Anthony Pryde


        
Release date: June 30, 2005 [eBook #14489]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14489

Credits: E-text prepared by Harry Graham Liston


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NIGHTFALL ***

NIGHTFALL

by

ANTHONY PRYDE







CHAPTER I


"Tea is ready, Bernard," said Laura Clowes, coming in from the
garden.

It was five o'clock on a June afternoon, but the hall was so dark
that she had to grope her way.  Wanhope was a large, old-fashioned
manor-house, a plain brick front unbroken except in the middle, where
its corniced roof was carried down by steps to an immense gateway of
weathered stone, carved with the escutcheon of the family and their
Motto: FORTIS ET FIDELIS. Wistarias rambled over both sides,
wreathing the stone window-frames in their grape-like clusters of
lilac bloom, and flagstones running from end to end, shallow, and so
worn that a delicate growth of stonecrop fringed them, shelved down
to a lawn.

Indoors in the great hall it was dark because floor and staircase
and wall and ceiling were all lined with Spanish chestnut-wood,
while the windows were full of Flemish glass in purple and sepia
and blue.  There was nothing to reflect a glint of light except a
collection of weapons of all ages which occupied the wall behind
a bare stone hearth; suits of inlaid armour, coats of chainmail
as flexible as silk, assegais and blowpipes, Bornean parangs and
Gurkha kukris, Abyssinian shotels with their double blades,
Mexican knives in chert and chalcedony, damascened swords and
automatic pistols, a Chinese bronze drum, a Persian mace of the
date of Rustum, and an Austrian cavalry helmet marked with a
bullet-hole and a stain.

Gradually, as her eyes grew used to the gloom Laura found her way
to her husband's couch.  She would have liked to kiss him, but
dared not: the narrow mocking smile, habitual on his lips, showed
no disposition to respond to advances.  Dressed in an ordinary
suit of Irish tweed, Bernard Clowes lay at full length in an easy
attitude, his hands in his pockets and his legs decently extended
as Barry, his male nurse, had left them twenty minutes ago: a
big, powerful man, well over six feet in height, permanently
bronze and darkly handsome, his immense shoulders still held back
so flat that his coat fitted without a wrinkle--but a cripple
since the war.

Laura Clowes too was tall and slightly sunburnt,  but thin for
her height, and rather plain except for her sweet eyes, her silky
brown hair, and--rarer gift!--the vague elegance which was a
prerogative of Selincourt women.  She rarely wore expensive
clothes, her maid Catherine made most of her indoor dresses,
and yet she could still hold her own, as in old days, among
women who shopped in the Rue de la Paix.  This afternoon, in her
silk muslin of the same shade as the trail of wistaria tucked
in where the frills crossed over her breast, she might have gone
astray out of the seventeenth century.

"Tea is in the parlour," said Mrs. Clowes. "Shall I wheel you
round through the garden?  It's a lovely day and the roses are
in their perfection, I counted eighty blooms on the old Frau
Karl.  I should like you to see her."

"I shouldn't.  But you can drag me into the parlour if you like,"
said Bernard Clowes--a grudging concession: more often than not
he ate his food in the hall.  His wife pushed his couch, which
ran on cycle wheels and so lightly that a child could propel it,
into her sitting-room and as near as she dared to the French
windows that opened without step or ledge on the terrace
flagstones and the verdure of the lawn.  Out of doors, for some
obscure reason, he refused to go, though the garden was sweet
with the scent of clover and the gold sunlight was screened by
the milky branches of a great acacia.  Still he was in the fresh
air, and Laura hastily busied herself with her flowered Dresden
teacups, pretending unconsciousness because if she had shown the
slightest satisfaction he would probably have demanded to be
taken back. Her mild duplicity was of course mere make believe:
the two understood each other only too well: but it was wiser to
keep a veil drawn in case Bernard Clowes should suddenly return
to his senses.  For this reason Laura always spoke as if his
choice of a coffined life were only a day or two old.  Had he
said--as he might say at any moment--"Laura, I should like to
go for a drive," Laura would have been able without inconsistency
to reply, "Yes, dear: what time shall I order the car?" as though
they had been driving together every evening of their married
life.

"What have you been doing today?" Clowes  asked, sipping his tea
and looking out of the window.  He had shut himself up in his
bedroom with a headache and his wife had not seen him since the
night before.

"This morning I motored into Amesbury to change the library
books and to enquire after Canon Bodington. I saw Mrs. Bodington
and Phoebe and George--,"

"Who's George?"

"Their son in the Navy, don't you remember?  The Sapphire is in
dry dock--"

"How old is he?"

"Nineteen," said Mrs. Clowes.

"Oh.  Go on."

"I don't remember doing anything else except get some stamps at
the post office.  Stay, now I come to think of it, I met Mr.
Maturin, but I didn't  speak to him.  He only took off his hat to
me, Bernard. He is seventy-four."

"Dull sort of morning you seem to have had," said Bernard Clowes.

"What did you do after lunch?"

"With a great want of intelligence, I strolled down to Wharton to
see Yvonne, but she was out. They had all gone over to the big
garden party at Temple Brading.  I forgot about it--"

"Why weren't you asked?"

"I was asked but I didn't care to go.  Now that I am no longer in
my first youth these expensive crushes cease to amuse me."
Bernard gave an incredulous sniff but said nothing.  "On my way
home I looked in at the vicarage to settle the day for the school
treat.  Isabel has made Jack Bendish promise to help with the
cricket, and she seems to be under the impression that Yvonne
will join in the games.  I can hardly believe that anything will
induce Yvonne to play Nuts and May, but if it is to be done that
energetic child will do it.  No, I didn't see Val or Mr.
Stafford.  Val was over at Red Springs and Mr. Stafford was
preparing his sermon."

"Have you written any letters?"

"I wrote to father and sent him fifty pounds.  It was out of my
own allowance. He seems even harder up than usual.  I'm afraid
the latest system is not profitable."

"I should not think it would be, for Mr. Selincourt," replied
Bernard Clowes politely. "Monte Carlo never does pay unless one's
pretty sharp, and your father hasn't the brains of a flea.  Was
that the only letter you wrote?"

"Yes--will you have some more bread and butter?"

"And what letters did you get?"  Clowes pursued his leisured
catechism while he helped himself daintily to a fragile sandwich.
This was all part of the daily routine, and Laura, if she felt
any resentment, had long since grown out of showing it.

"One from Lucian.  He's in Paris--"

"With--?"

"No one, so far as I know," Laura replied, not affecting to
misunderstand his jibe.  Lucian Selincourt was her only brother
and very dear to her, but there was no denying that his career
had its seamy side.  He was not, like her father, a family
skeleton--he had never been warned off the Turf: but he was
rarely solitary and never out of debt. "Poor Lucian, he's hard
up too. I wish I could send him fifty pounds, but if I did he'd
send it back."

"What other letters did you have?"

Mrs. Clowes had had a sheaf of unimportant notes, which she was
made to describe in detail, her husband listening in his hard
patience.  When they were exhausted Laura went on in a hesitating
voice, "And there was one more that I want to consult you about.
I know you'll say we can't have him, but I hardly liked to refuse
on my own imitative, as he's your cousin, not mine.  It was from
Lawrence Hyde, offering to come here for a day or two."

"Lawrence Hyde?  Why, I haven't seen or heard of him for years,"
Clowes raised his head with a gleam of interest.  "I remember him
well enough though.  Good-looking chap, six foot two or three and
as strong as a horse.  Well-built chap, too.  Women ran after
him.  I haven't seen him since we were in the trenches together."

"Yes, Bernard.  Don't you recollect his going to see you in
hospital?"

"So he did, by Jove!  I'd forgotten that.  He'd ten days' leave
and he chucked one of them away to look me up.  Not such a bad
sort, old Lawrence."

"I liked him very much," said Laura quietly.

"Wants to come to us, does he?  Why?  Where does he write from?"

"Paris.  It seems he ran across Lucian at Auteuil--"

"Let me see the letter."

Laura give it over.  "Calls you Laura, does he?" Clowes read it
aloud with a running commentary of his own.  "H'm: pleasant
relationship, cousins-in-law. . . 'Met Lucian . . . chat about
old times'--is he a bird of Lucian's feather, I wonder?  He
wasn't keen on women in the old days, but people change a lot
in ten years . . . 'Like to come and see us while he's in
England . . . run over for the day'--bosh, he knows we should
have to put him up for a couple of nights! . . . 'Sorry to hear
such a bad account of Bernard'--Very kind of him, does he want
a cheque?  Hallo!  'Lucian says he is leading you a deuce of a
life.' Upon my word!"  He lowered the letter and burst out
laughing--the first hearty laugh she had heard from him for many
a long day.  Laura, who had given him the letter in fear and
trembling and only because she could not help herself, was
exceedingly relieved and joined in merrily.  But while she was
laughing she had to wink a sudden moisture from her eyelashes:
this glimpse of the natural self of the man she had married went
to her heart.  "Is it true?" he said, still with that friendly
twinkle in his eyes.  "Do I lead you the deuce of a life, poor
old Laura?"

"I don't mind," said Laura, smiling back at him.  She could have
been more eloquent, but she dared not.  Bernard's moods required
delicate handling.

"He's a cool hand anyhow to write like that to a woman about her
husband.  But Lawrence always was a cool hand. I remember the
turn-up we had in the Farringay woods when I was twelve and he
was fourteen.  He nearly murdered me. But I paid him out," said
Bernard in a glow of pleasurable reminiscence.  "He was too
heavy for me. Old Andrew Hyde came and dragged him off.  But
I marked him: he was banished from his mother's drawingroom for
a week--not that he minded that much . . . Aunt Helen was a
pretty woman.  Gertrude and I never could think why she married
Uncle Andrew, but I believe they got on all right, though she was
a big handsome woman--a Clowes all over--while old Andrew
looked like any little scrub out of Houndsditch.  Never can tell
why people marry each other, can you?" Bernard was becoming
philosophical.  I suppose if you go to the bottom it's Nature
that takes them by the scruff of the neck and gives them a gentle
shove and says 'More babies, please.' She doesn't always bring it
off though, witness you and me, my love.--  But I say, Laura, I
like the way you handed over that letter!  Thought it would do me
good, didn't you?  Look here, I can't have my character taken
away behind my back!  You tell him to come and judge for
himself."

"You'll get very tired of him, Berns," said Laura doubtfully.
"You always say you get sick of people in twenty-four hours: and
I can't take him entirely off your hands--you'll have to do your
share of entertaining him.  He's your cousin, not mine, and it'll
be you he comes to see."

"I shan't see any more of him than I want to, my dear, on that
you may depend," said Bernard with easy emphasis.  "If he
invites himself he'll have to put with what he can get.  But
I can stand a good deal of him.  Regimental shop is always
amusing, and Lawrence will know heaps of fellows I used to know,
and tell me what's become of them all.  Besides, I'm sick to
death of the local gang and Lawrence will be a change.  He's got
more brains than Jack Bendish, and from the style of his letter
he can't be so much like a curate as Val is."  Val Stafford was
agent for the Wanhope property.  "Oh,  by George!"

"What's the matter?"

Bernard threw back his head and grinned broadly with half shut
eyes.  "Ha, ha! by Gad, that's funny--that's very funny.  Why,
Val knows him!"

"Knows Lawrence?  I never heard Val mention his name."

"No, my love, but one can't get Val to open his lips on that
subject. Lawrence and I were in the same battalion.  He was there
when Val got his ribbon."

"Really?  That will be nice for Val, meeting him again."

"Oh rather!" said Bernard Clowes. "On my word it's a shame and
I've half a mind . . .. No, let him come: let him come and be
damned to the pair of them!  Straighten me out, will you?" He was
liable like most paralytics to mechanical jerks and convulsions
which drove him mad with impatience.  Laura drew down the
helplessly twitching knee, and ran one firm hand over him from
thigh to ankle.  Her touch had a mesmeric effect on his nerves
when he could endure it, but nine times out of ten he struck it
away. He did so now. "Go to the devil!  How often have I told
you not to paw me about?  I wish you'd do as you're told.  What
do you call him Lawrence for?"

"I always did.  But I'll call him Captain Hyde if you like--"

"'Mr.,' you mean: he's probably dropped the 'Captain.' He was
only a 'temporary.'"

"For all that, he has stuck to his prefix," said Laura smiling.
"Lucian chaffed him about it. But Lawrence was always rather a
baby in some ways: clocked socks to match his ties, and
astonishing adventures in jewellery, and so on.  Oh yes, I knew
him very well indeed when I was a girl.  Mr. and Mrs. Hyde were
among the last of the old set who kept up with us after father
was turned out of his clubs.  I've stayed at Farringay."

"You never told me that!"

"I never thought of telling you. Lawrence hasn't been near us
since we came to Wanhope and I don't recollect your ever
mentioning his name.  You see I tell you now."

"How old were you when you stayed at Farringay?"

"Twenty-two.  Lawrence and I are the same age."

"And you knew him well, did you?"

"We were great friends," said Mrs. Clowes, tossing a lump of
sugar out of the window to a lame jackdaw. She had many such
pensioners, alike in a community of misfortune.  "And, yes,
Berns, you're right, we flirted a little--only a little: wasn't
it natural?  It was only for fun, because we were both young and
it was such heavenly weather--it was the Easter before war broke
out.  No, he didn't ask me to marry him!  Nothing was farther
from his mind."

"Did he kiss you?"

Laura slowly and smilingly shook her head. "Am I, Yvonne?"

"But you liked the fellow?"

"Oh yes, he was charming.  A little too much one of a class,
perhaps: there's a strong family likeness, isn't there, between
Cambridge undergraduates?  But he was more cultivated than a good
many of his class.  We used to go up the river together and read
--what did one read in the spring of 1914?  Masefield, I suppose,
or was it Maeterlinck?  Rupert Brooks came with the war.  Imagine
reading 'Pelleas et Melisande' in a Canadian canoe!  It makes one
want to be twenty-two again, so young and so delightfully
serious."  It was hard to run on while the glow faded out of
Bernard's face and a cold gloom again came over it, but sad
experience had taught Laura that at all costs, under whatever
temptation, it was wiser to be frank.  It would have been easier
for the moment to paint the boy and girl friendship in neutral
tints, but if its details came out later, trivial and innocent
as they were, the economy of today would cost her dear tomorrow,
Her own impression was that Clowes had never been jealous of her
in his life.  But the pretence of jealousy was one of his few
diversions.

"I dare say you do wish you were twenty-two again," he said,
delicately setting down his tea cup on the tray--all his
movements, so far as he could control them, were delicate and
fastidious. "I dare say you would like a chance to play your
cards differently.  Can't be done, my, girl, but what a good
fellow I am to ask Lawrence to Wanhope, ain't I? No one can say
I'm not an obliging husband.  Lawrence isn't a jumping doll. He's
six and thirty and as strong as a horse.  You'll have no end of a
good time knitting up your severed friendship .. 'Pon my word,
I've a good mind to put him off. . I shouldn't care to fall foul
of the King's Proctor."

"Will you have another cup of tea before I ring"

"No, thanks . . . Do I lead you the deuce of a life, Lally?"

"You do now and then," said his wife, smiling with pale lips.

"It isn't that I'm sensitive for myself, because I know you don't
mean a word of it, but I rather hate it for your own sake.  It
isn't worthy of you, old boy.  It's so--so ungentlemanly."

"So it is.  But I do it because I'm bored.  I am bored, you know.
Desperately!" He stretched out his hand to her with such haggard,
hunted eyes that Laura, reckless, threw herself down by him and
kissed the heavy eyelids.  Clowes put his arm round her neck,
fondling her hair, and for a little while peace, the peace of
perfect mutual tenderness, fell on this hard-driven pair.  But
soon, a great sigh bursting from his breast, Clowes pushed her
away, his features settling back into their old harsh lines of
savage pain and scorn.

"Get away! get up! do you want Parker to see you through the
window?  If there's a thing on earth I hate it's a dishevelled
crying woman.  Write to Lawrence.  Say I shall be delighted to
see him and that I hope he'll give us at least a week. Stop.
Warn him that I shan't be able to see much of him because of
my invalid habits, and that I shall depute you to entertain
him.  That ought to fetch him if he remembers you when you were
twenty-two."

Laura was neither dishevelled nor in tears: perhaps such scenes
were no novelty to her.  She leant against the frame of the open
window, looking out over the sunlit garden full of flowers, over
the wide expanse of turf that sloped down to a wide, shallow
river all sparkling in western light, and over airy fields on
the other side of it to the roofs of the distant village strung
out under a break of woody hill.

"Are you sure you want him?  He used to have a hot temper when he
was a young man, and you know, Berns, it would be tiresome if
there were any open scandal."

"Scandal be hanged,"  said Bernard Clowes. "You do as you're
told."  His wife gave an almost imperceptible shrug of the
shoulders as if to disclaim further responsibility.  She was
breathing rather hurriedly as if she had been running, and her
neck was so white that the shadow of her sunlit wistaria threw a
faint lilac stain on the warm, fine grain of her skin.  And the
haggard look returned to Bernard's eyes as he watched her, and
with it a wistfulness, a weariness of desire, "hungry, and
barren, and sharp as the sea."  Laura never saw that hunger in
his eyes.  If he spared her nothing else he spared her that.

"You do as I tell you, old girl," his harsh voice had softened
again. "There won't be any row.  Honestly I'd like to have old
Lawrence here for a bit, I'm not rotting now.  He had almost four
years of it--almost as long as I had.  I'll guarantee it put a
mark on him.  It scarred us all. It'll amuse me to dine him and
Val together, and make them talk shop, our own old shop, and see
what the war's done for each of us: three retired veterans,
that's what we shall be, putting our legs under the same
mahogany: three old comrades in arms." He gave his strange,
jarring laugh. "Wonder which of us is scarred deepest?"




CHAPTER II


WANHOPE and Castle Wharton--or, to give them their due order,
Wharton and Wanhope, for Major Clowes' place would have gone
inside the Castle three times over--were the only country
houses in the Reverend James Stafford's parish.  The village
of Chilmark--a stone bridge, crossroads, a church with Norman
tower and frondlike Renaissance tracery, and an irregular line
of school, shops, and cottages strung out between the stream and
chalky beech-crested hillside occupied one of those long, winding,
sheltered crannies that mark the beds of watercourses along the
folds of Salisbury Plain.  Uplands rose steeply all along it
except on the south, where it widened away into the flats of
Dorsetshire.  Wharton overlooked this expanse of hunting country:
a formidable Norman keep, round which, by gradual accretion, a
dwelling-place had grown up, a history of English architecture
and English gardening written in stone and brick and grass and
flowers.  One sunny square there was, enclosed between arched
hedges set upon pillars of carpenters' work, which still kept the
design of old Verulam: and Yvonne of the Castle loved its little
turrets and cages of singing birds, and its alleys paved with
burnet, wild thyme, and watermints, which perfume the air most
delightfully, not passed by as the rest, but being trodden upon
and crushed.

Wanhope also, though modest by comparison, had a good deal of
land attached to it, but the Clowes property lay north up the
Plain, where they sowed the headlands with red wheat still as
in the days of Justice Shallow.  The shining Mere, a tributary
of the Avon, came dancing down out of these hills: strange
pastoral cliffs of chalk covered with fine sward, and worked by
the hands of prehistoric man into bastions and ramparts that
imitated in verdure the bold sweep of masonry.

Mr. Stafford was a man of sixty, white-haired and of sensitive,
intelligent features.  He was a High Churchman, but wore a felt
wideawake in winter because when he bought it wideawakes were
the fashion for High Churchmen.  In the summer he usually roved
about his parish without any hat at all, his white curls flying
in the wind.  He was of gentle birth, which tended to ease his
intercourse with the Castle.  He had a hundred a year of his own,
and the living of Chilmark was worth 175 pounds net.  So it may
have been partly from necessity that he went about in clothes at
which any respectable tramp would have turned his nose up: but
idiosyncrasy alone can have inspired him to get the village tailor
to line his short blue pilot jacket with pink flannelette.  "It's
very warm and comfortable, my dear," he said apologetically to his
wife, who sat and gazed at him aghast, "so much more cosy than
Italian cloth."

On that occasion Mrs. Stafford was too late to interfere, but as
a rule she exercised a restraining influence, and while she lived
the vicar was not allowed to go about with holes in his trousers.
After her death Mr. Stafford mourned her sincerely and cherished
her memory, but all the same he was glad to be able to wear his
old boots.  However, he had a cold bath every morning and kept
his hands irreproachable, not from vanity but from an inbred
instinct of personal care.  Yvonne of the Castle, who spoke her
mind as Yvonne's of the Castle commonly do, said that the fewer
clothes Mr. Stafford wore the better she liked him, because he
was always clean and they were not.

Mr. Stafford had three children; Val, late of the Dorchester
Regiment, Rowsley an Artillery lieutenant two years younger,
and Isabel the curate, a tall slip of a girl of nineteen.  They
were all beloved, but Val was the prop of the family and the
pride of his father's heart.  Invalided out of the Army after
six weeks' fighting, with an honourable distinction and an
irremediably shattered arm, he had been given the agency of the
Wanhope property, and lived at home, where the greater part of
his three hundred a year went to pay the family bills.  Most of
these were for what Mr. Stafford gave away, for the vicar had no
idea of the value of money, and was equally generous with Val's
income and his own.

Altogether Mr. Stafford was a contented and happy man, and his
only worry was the thought, which crossed his mind now and then,
that Chilmark for a young man of Val's age was dull, and that the
Wanhope agency led nowhere.  If Val had been an ambitious man!
But Val was not ambitious, and Mr Stafford thanked heaven that
this pattern son of his had never been infected by the vulgar
modern craze for money making. His salary would not have kept him
in luxury in a cottage of his own, but it was enough to make the
vicarage a comfortable home for him; and, so long as he remained
unmarried, what could he want more, after all, than the society
of his own family and his kind country neighbours?

Rowsley, cheerfully making both ends meet in the Artillery on an
allowance from his godmother, was off his father's hands.
Isabel?  Mr. Stafford did not trouble much about Isabel, who was
only a little girl.  She was a happy, healthy young thing, and
Mr. Stafford was giving her a thoroughly good education.  She
would be able to earn her own living when he died, if she were
not married, as every woman ought to be.  (There was no one for
Isabel to marry, but Mr. Stafford's principles rose superior to
facts.)  Meantime it was not as if she were running wild: that
sweet woman Laura Clowes and the charming minx at the Castle
between them could safely be left to form her manners and see
after her clothes.

One summer afternoon Isabel was coming back from an afternoon's
tennis at Wharton.  Mrs. Clowes brought her in the Wanhope car as
far as the Wanhope footpath, and would have sent her home, but
Isabel declined, ostensibly because she wanted to stretch her
legs, actually because she couldn't afford to tip the Wanhope
chauffeur.  So she tumbled out of the car and walked away at a
great rate, waving Laura farewell with her tennis racquet.
Isabel was a tall girl of nineteen, but she still plaited her
hair in a pigtail which swung, thick and dark and glossy, well
below her waist.  She wore a holland blouse and skirt, a sailor
hat trimmed with a band of Rowsley's ribbon, brown cotton
stockings, and brown sandshoes bought for 5/11-3/4 of Chapman,
the leading draper in Chilmark High Street.  Isabel made her own
clothes and made them badly.  Her skirt was short in front and
narrow below the waist, and her sailor blouse was comfortably but
inelegantly loose round the armholes.  Laura Clowes, who had a
French instinct of dress, and would have clad Isabel as Guinevere
clad Enid, if Isabel had not been prouder than Enid, looked after
her with a smile and a sigh: it was a grief to her to see her
young friend so shabby, but, bless the child! how little she
cared--and how little it signified after all!  Isabel's poverty
sat as light on her spirits as the sailor hat, never straight,
sat on her upflung head.

Isabel knew every one in Chilmark parish.  Pausing before a knot
of boys playing marbles: "Herbert," she said sternly, "why
weren't you at school on Sunday?" Old Hewett, propped like a
wheezy mummy against the oak tree that shaded the Prince of
Wales's Feathers, brought up his stiff arm slowly in a salute to
the vicar's daughter. "'Evening," said Isabel cheerfully, "what a
night for rheumatics isn't it?"  Hewitt chuckled mightily at this
subtle joke. "'Evening, Isabel," called out Dr. Verney, putting
up one finger to his cap: he considered one finger enough for a
young lady whom he had brought into the world.  Isabel knew every
one in Chilmark and every one knew her.  Such a range of
intensive acquaintance is not so narrow as people who have never
lived in a country village are apt to suppose.

Past the schoolhouse, past the wide stone bridge where Isabel
loved to hang over the parapet watching for trout--but not
tonight, for it was late, and Isabel after a "company tea" wanted
her supper: by a footpath through the churchyard, closely mown
and planted with rosebushes: and so into the church, where, after
dropping a hurried professional curtsey to the altar, she set
about her evening duties. Isabel called herself the curate, but
she did a good deal which is not expected of a curate, such as
shutting windows and changing lesson-markers, propping up the
trebles when they went astray in the pointing of the Psalms,
altering the numbers on the hymn-board, writing out choir papers,
putting flowers in the vases and candles in the benediction
lights, playing the organ as required and occasionally blowing
it. . . . Before leaving the church she fell on her knees, in
deference to Mr. Stafford and the text by the door, and said a
prayer.  What did she pray?  "O Lord bless this church and all
who worship in it and make father preach a good sermon next
Sunday. I wish I'd been playing with Val instead of Jack, we
should have won that last set if Jack hadn't muffed his
services. . . .  Well, this curate was only nineteen."

And then, coming out into the fading light, she locked the north
door behind her and went off whistling like a blackbird, if a
blackbird could whistle the alto of Calkin's Magnificat in B
flat. . . . Five minutes climbing of the steep brown floor of
the beechwood, and she was out on uplands in the dying fires of
day.  It had been twilight in the valley, but here the wide plain
was sunlit and the air was fresh and dry: in the valley even the
river-aspens were almost quiet, but here there was still a sough
of wind coming and going, through the dry grass thick set with
lemon thyme and lady's slipper, or along the low garden wall
where red valerian sprouted out of yellow stonecrop.

A wishing gate led into the garden, and Isabel made for an open
window, but halfway over the sill she paused, gazing with all her
soul in her eyes across the vicarage gooseberry bushes.  That
grey suit was Val's of course, but who was inside the belted coat
and riding breeches?  "Rows-lee!" sang out Isabel, tumbling back
into the garden with a generous display of leg.  The raiders rose
up each holding a handful of large red strawberries melting ripe,
and Isabel, pitching in her racquet on a sofa, ran across the
grass and enfolded her brother in her arms.  Rowsley, dark and
slight and shrewd, returned her hug with one arm, while carefully
guarding his strawberries with the other--"You pig, you perfect
pig!" wailed Isabel.  "I was saving them for tea tomorrow,
Laura's coming and I can't afford a cake.  Oh joy, you can buy me
one!  How long can you stay?"

"Over the week end: but I didn't come to buy you cakes, Baby. I
haven't any money either. I came because I wanted you to buy me
cakes."

"O well never mind, I'll make one," Isabel joyously slipped her
hand through Rowsley's arm. "Then I can get the flour from the
baker and it won't cost anything at all--it'll go down in the
bill. Well give me one anyhow, now they're picked it would be a
pity to waste them." She helped herself liberally out of Val's
hand.  "Now stop both of you, you can't have any more."

She linked her other arm in Val's and dragged her brothers out of
the dangerous proximity of the strawberry beds.  Val sat down on
a deck chair, one leg thrown over the other, Rowsley dropped at
full length on the turf, and Isabel doubled herself up between
them, her arms clasped round her knees.  "How's the Old Man?" she
asked in friendly reference to Rowsley's commanding officer.
"Oh Rose, I knew there was something I wanted to ask you.  Will
Spillsby be able to play on the Fourth?"  Spillsby, a brother
subaltern and a famous bat, had twisted his ankle at the nets,
and Rowsley in his last letter had been uncertain whether he
would be well enough to play the Sappers at the annual fixture.

Happily Rowsley was able to reassure his young sister: the ankle
was much better and Spillsby was already allowed to walk on it.
Isabel then turned her large velvet eyes--gazelle eyes with a
world of pathos in their velvet gloom on her elder brother.
"Coruscate, Val," she commanded.  "You haven't said anything at
all yet.  We should all try to be bright in the home circle.  We
cannot all be witty, but-Ow!  Rowsley, if you pull my hair I
shall hit you in the--in the place where the Gauls fined their
soldiers if they stuck out on parade.  Oh, Val, that really isn't
vulgar, I found it in Matthew Arnold!  Their stomachs, you know.
They wouldn't have fined you anyhow.  You look fagged, darling--
are you?"

"Not so much fagged as hungry," said Val in his soft voice. "It's
getting on for nine o'clock and I was done out of my tea. I went
in to Wanhope, but Laura was out, and Clowes was drinking whisky
and soda. I cannot stand whisky at four in the afternoon, and
Irish whisky at that.  There'll be some supper going before long,
won't there?"

"Not until half past nine because Jimmy has his Bible class
tonight."  Jimmy was Mr. Stafford: and perhaps a purist might
have objected that Mrs. Clowes and Yvonne Bendish had not done
all they might have done to form Isabel's manners. "I'm so sorry,
darling," she continued, preparing to leap to her feet.  "Shall I
get you a biscuit?  There are oatmeals in the sideboard, the kind
you like, I won't be a minute--"

"Thanks very much, I'd rather wait.  Did you see Mrs. Clowes
today? Clowes said she was at the Castle."

"So she was, sitting with Mrs. Morley in an angelic striped
cotton.  Mrs. Morley was in mauve ninon and a Gainsborough hat.
Yvonne says Mr. Morley is a Jew and made his money in I. D. B.'s,
which I suppose are some sort of stocks?" Neither of her brothers
offered to enlighten her, Rowsley because he was feeling
indolent, Val because he never said an unkind word to any one.
Isabel, who was enamoured of her own voice flowed on with little
delay: "If he really is a Jew, I can't think how she could marry
him; I wouldn't. Mrs. Morley can't be very happy or Laura
wouldn't go and talk to her.  Laura is so sweet, she always sits
with people that other people run away from.  Oh Val, did Major
Clowes tell you their news?" Isabel might refer to her father as
Jimmy and to Rowsley's commander as the Old Man, but she rarely
failed to give Bernard Clowes his correct prefix.

"No--is there any?"

"Only that they have some one coming to stay with them.  Won't he
have a deadly time?" Isabel glanced from Val to Rowsley in the
certainty of a common response. "Imagine staying at Wanhope!
However, he invited himself, so it's at his own risk.  Perhaps
he's embarrassed like you, Rose, and wants Laura to feed him.
It's rather fun for Laura, though--that is, it will be, if Major
Clowes isn't too hopeless."

Strange freemasonry of the generations!  Mr. Stafford's children
loved him dearly and he was wont to say that there were no
secrets at the vicarage, yet they lived in a conspiracy of
silence, and even Val, who was mentally nearer to his father's
age, would have been loth to let Mr. Stafford know as much as
Isabel knew about Wanhope.  It was assumed that Val's job was the
very job Val wanted.  Mr. Stafford had indeed a suspicion that it
was not all plain sailing:  Bernard Clowes retained just so much
of the decently bred man as to be courteous to his wife before a
mere acquaintance, but the vicar came and went at odd hours, and
he observed now and then vague intimations--undertones from
Bernard himself, an uncontrollable shrinking on Laura's part, an
occasional hesitation or reluctance in Val--which hinted at
flying storms.  But Val, the father supposed, could make
allowance for a cripple: Bernard was so much to be pitied that no
man would resent an occasional burst of temper!  And there his
children left him. The younger generation can trust one another
not to interfere, but when the seniors strike in, with their cut
and dry precedents and rule of thumb moralities, who knows what
mischief may follow?  Elder people are so indiscreet!

"It's a cousin of Major Clowes,"  Isabel continued, "but they
haven't met for years and years--not since the war.  Laura knows
him too, she met him before she was married and liked him very
much indeed.  She's looking forward to it--that is, she would be
if she had spirit enough to look forward to anything."

"Clowes never said a word to me about it," remarked Val.

"Didn't he?" Isabel unfolded herself and stood up. "That means he
is going to be tiresome.  I must run now, it's five past nine.
Which will you both have, cold beef or eggs?"

"Oh, anything that's going," said Val.

"Eggs," said Rowsley, "not less than four.  Without prejudice to
the cold beef if it's underdone.  Hallo!"

"What?"

"What's the matter with your skirt?"

"Nothing," said Isabel shortly.  She screwed her head over her
shoulder in a vain endeavour to see her own back.  "It's
perfectly all right."

"It would be, on a scarecrow." Isabel stuck her chin up.  "Have
you been over to the Castle in that kit, Baby?  Well, if Yvonne
won't give you some of her old clothes, you might ask the
kitchenmaid."

"The kitchenmaid has more money than I have," said Isabel
cheerfully.  "Is it so very bad?  It's clean anyway, I washed and
ironed it myself."

"It looks very nice and so do you," said Val. Isabel eyed him
with a softened glance: one could rely on Val to salve one's
wounded vanity, but, alas!  Val did not know home-made from
tailor-made. Reluctantly she owned to herself that she had more
faith in Rowsley's judgment.  "It seems rather short though," Val
added. "I suppose you will have to go into long frocks pretty
soon, won't you, and put your hair up?"

"Oh bother my hair and my dresses!" said Isabel with a great
sigh.  "I will pin my hair up when I get some new clothes, but
how can I when I haven't any money and Jim hasn't any money and
neither of you have any money?  Don't you see, idiot," this was
exclusively to Rowsley, "when I pin my hair up I shall turn into
a grown up lady?  And then I shall have to wear proper clothes.
At present I'm only a little girl and it doesn't signify what I
wear. If any one will give me five pounds I'll pin my hair up
like a shot.  Oh dear, I wonder what Yvonne would say if Jack
expected her to outfit herself for five pounds? I do wish some
one would leave me 10,000 pounds a year.  Get up now, you lazy
beggar, come and help me lay the supper.  It's Fanny's evening
out."

She pulled Rowsley to his feet and they went off together leaving
Val alone on the lawn: good comrades those two, and apparently
more of an age, in spite of the long gap between them, than
Rowsley and Val, who was the eldest by only eighteen months.  And
Val sat on alone, while stains of coral and amber faded out of
the lavender sky, and a rack of sea clouds, which half an hour
ago had shone like fiery ripples, dwindled away into smoke--mist
--a mere shadow on the breast of the night. Stars began to
sparkle, moths and humming cockchafers sailed by him, a chase of
bats overhead endlessly fell down airy precipices and rose in
long loops of darkling flight: honeysuckle and night-scented
stock tinged with their sweet garden perfume the cool airs from
the moor.

Val lit a cigarette, a rare indulgence.  If cigarettes grew on
gooseberry bushes Val would have been an inveterate smoker, but
good Egyptians were a luxury which he could not often afford
The Wanhope agency was ample for his needs, though underpaid as
agencies go: but there was Rowsley, always hard up, uncomplaining,
but sensitive, as a young fellow in his position is sure to be, and
secretly fretting because he could not do as other men did: and there
was Isabel, for whom Val felt the anxiety Mr. Stafford ought to have
felt, and was trying to make the provision Mr. Stafford ought to have
made: and then there was the vicar himself, who laid out a great deal
of money in those investments for which we are promised cent per cent
interest, but upon a system of deferred payment.

Tonight however Val lit a cigarette, and then a second, to the
surprise of Isabel, who saw the red spark on the lawn.  She
thought her brother must be tired, and perhaps it really was the
long day without food that made him so restless in mind and so
uneasy.  Bernard Clowes had been more than usually cranky that
afternoon.  Even the patient Val had had thoughts of throwing up
his job when the cripple made him go through his week's accounts,
scrutinizing every entry and cross-examining him on every
transaction in such a tone as the head of a firm might employ to
a junior clerk suspected of dishonesty.  It was Bernard's way:
it meant nothing: but it was irksome to Val, especially when he
could not soothe himself by dropping into Laura's quiet parlour
for a cup of tea.  Yet his irritation would not have lingered
through a cigarette if Isabel's news had not revived it.  This
cousin of Bernard's!  Val had not much faith in any cousin of
Bernard Clowes: nor in the kindness of life.

Val was a slight, fair, pleasant-looking man of eight or nine and
twenty, quiet of movement, friendly-mannered and as inconspicuous
as his own rather worn grey tweeds: one of a class, till he
raised his eyes: and then?  There was something strange in Val's eyes
when they were fully raised, an indrawn arresting brilliance
difficult to analyse: imaginative and sympathetic, as if he were at
home in dark places: the quality of acceptance of pain.

Adepts in old days knew by his eyes a man who had been on the
rack.  Stafford had been racked: and by the pain that is half
shame, the keenest, the most lacerating and destructive of
wounds.  He had suffered till he could suffer no more, and
tonight in the starlit garden he, suffered still, without hope,
or rebellion, or defence.

Indoors Rowsley and Isabel, with the rapidity of long use, laid
the cloth, and Isabel fetched cold beef from the larder and
butter and eggs from the dairy, while Rowsley went down the
cellar with a jug and a candle and drew from the cask a generous
allowance of beer.  "Come along in, old Val," said Isabel,
reappearing at the open window, "You and Rose are both famishing
and I'm not," this was a pious fiction, "so you can begin and
I'll wait for Jimmy.  I dare say he's gone wandering off
somewhere and won't be in till ten."

Val came across the dark, cool lawn and climbed over the window
sill.  A shabby room, large and low: a faded paper, grey toning
to blue: a carpet of faded roses on a grey ground: the shaded
Dresden lamp and roselit supper table shining like an island in
a pool of shadow, and those two beloved heads, both so dark and
smooth and young, tam cara capita!  Neither of them suspected
that Val was unhappy.  His feeling for them was more fatherly
than fraternal, and Rowsley, strange to say, fell in with Val's
attitude, coming to his brother for money as naturally as most
young men go to their parents.  Val sat at the head of the table
because Mr. Stafford could not carve.  "There!" said Isabel,
giving him his plate.  "Mustard?  I've just made it so you
needn't look to see if it's fresh.  Watercress: I picked it
myself.  Lettuce.  Cream and vinegar and sugar.  Beer.  Now do
you feel happy?  Lord love you, dear, I like to see you eat."

She sat on the arm of Mr. Stafford's mahogany chair.  "What time
do you want breakfast? Seven o'clock?  Major Clowes wouldn't come
down at seven if he were your agent.  Can you get back to tea
tomorrow?  Laura may bring the cousin up to tea with her and she
wants him to meet you."

"Very good of her.  Why?"

"Oh, because he was in the Army too and all through the war.  He
went out with the first hundred thousand.  He's much older than
you are--the same age as Laura.  Oh, wait a minute!" exclaimed
Isabel in the tone in which a Frenchwoman says Tenez. I forgot.
She thinks you must have met him, Val."

"Possibly," said Val.

"Was he in the Dorchesters?" asked Rowsley--much more
interested than his brother,  no doubt because he was not so
hungry as Val, who was giving all his attention to his supper.

"No, in the Winchesters," said Isabel.  "Do I mean the
Winchesters,   Val?  What was Major Clowes' old regiment?"

"Clowes was in the Wintons."

Isabel nodded. "Then so was the cousin.  And Laura says he was
out there when the Wintons were in the next bit of trench north
of the Dorchesters.  He was there when--when you were wounded."
Such was Val Stafford's modesty that in the family circle it was
not in etiquette to refer in other terms to that famous occasion.

"I don't remember any fellow named Clowes and I never knew
Bernard Clowes had a cousin out there," said Val, mixing himself
a salad.

"Oh, his name isn't Clowes.  It's Ryde or Pride or something like
that.  I'm sorry to be so vague, but Jack Bendish and Yvonne and
Mrs. Morley were all talking at once.  Lawrence Pied--Fried--"

"Lawrence Hyde?"

"Yes, that's it!  Then you really do remember him?"

"Er--yes.   Is that lamp smoking, Rowsley?  You might turn it
down a trifle, I can't reach."

"Let me, let me?--  What was he like?"

"Who--Hyde?  Oh," said Val vaguely, "he was like the rest of us
--very tired."

"Tired?" echoed Isabel with a blank face, "but, Val darling, he
couldn't have been only tired!  What should you think he was like
when he wasn't tired?"

"That is a question I have occasionally asked myself," Val
answered with his faint indecipherable smile.  "My dear child,
I only saw him once or twice.  He was a senior captain and
commanded his company. I was a very junior lieutenant."

"Still he was there at the time," reflected Isabel. "O Rose! if
he's anything like nice, which is almost past praying for in
Major Clowes' cousin, let's beguile him into the gooseberry
bushes and make him tell us all about it!  Val is very dear to
his family, but no one, however tenderly attached to him, could
call him a brilliant raconteur.  Now Mr. Hyde won't have any
modest scruples.  Val, if there is a slug in that lettuce I wish
you would say so. It would hurt my feelings less than for you to
sit looking at it in a stony silence.  Was he good-looking?"

"Possibly he might be," said Val, "when he scraped the dirt off."
 After a moment he added, "He was very decent to me."

"Was he?  Then he was nice?"

"Gnat,"  said Rowsley from the middle of his third egg.  Isabel
rounded him indignantly.

"I'm not gnatting!  I'm not asking Val anything about himself, am
I? Val can't possibly mind telling me about another man in
another regiment.  You eat your eggs, there's a good boy, before
they get cold.--  Laura says the Dorchesters dined the Winchesters
once when they were in billets.  Was that when you and Mr. Hyde
were there?"

"Captain Hyde," Val corrected his young sister.  "Yes, we both
graced the festive board.  It was too festive for me.  We had
Buszard's soup and curried chicken and real cream, and more
champagne than was good for us.  But it was not on that occasion
that Hyde was so decent to me.  The day I--the day Dale went
down--" Rowsley nodded to him as he raised his glass of beer to
his lips--"thank you, Rose.--  As I was saying, that evening I
ran across Hyde between the lines.  The Dorsets and Wintons had
gone over the top together, and he had been left behind with a
bullet in his chest.  I was done to the world, but he had some
brandy left and shared it with me.  If it had not been for Hyde I
should never have brought Dale in."

"Well, I've never heard that before," said Rowsley to his fourth
egg.

Isabel was silent, and her eyes in the shadow of a momentary
gravity were the eyes of a woman and not of a child.  She raised
them to look out at the evening sky, indigo blue against the
lamplit interior, or faintly primrose in the west, and wondered
for the thousandth time why it was still such an effort to Val to
refer to his brief military experience.  Soft country noises came
in, peaceful and soothing: the short shrill shriek of a bat, the
rustle of a branch of rose-leaves moving like a hand over the
window panes, a faint breathing of wind from the moor.  Surely
the scar of war ought to be healed by now!  Isabel kept these
thoughts to herself: young as she was, her solitary life--for
a woman alone among men is always to some extent solitary--had
trained her to a clear perception of what had better not be said.

"When is Hyde coming?" asked Val, going on with his salad.

"Tomorrow, didn't you hear me say Laura is going to bring him
here to tea?  He's staying at his own place, Farringay--I think
from the way Laura spoke it is what one calls a place--and they
expect him by the morning train.  Laura's to meet him in the
car."

"Did you ask her to bring him in to tea,"  said Rowsley, frowning
over the marmalade jar, "when Val is safe to be out and you
didn't know I should be here?"

"Yes: oughtn't I to have?"

"No."

"Is there anything else you would like to speak to me about?"
said Isabel after a pregnant silence. "Dear Rowsley, you seem
determined to look after my manners and morals!  I asked him to
please Laura. She's nervous of Major Clowes.  Jack and Yvonne
are coming too."

"Oh I don't see that it signifies," said Val.  Mrs. Clowes
wouldn't have accepted if it weren't all right. I don't see that
you or I need worry if she doesn't.  Isabel is old enough to pour
out tea for herself.  In any case, as it happens, you'll be here
if I'm not, and I dare say Jimmy will look in for ten minutes."

"You are sweet, Val," said Isabel gratefully.

"Oh I don't say Rowsley's not right!  Prigs generally are: and
besides now I come to think of it, Laura did look faintly amused
when I asked her. But these stupid things never occur to me till
afterwards!  After all, what am I to do?  I can't manufacture a
chaperon, and it would be very bad for the parish if the vicar
never entertained.  And it's not as if Captain Hyde were a young
man; he's thirty-six if he's a day."




CHAPTER III


When the sea retreats after a storm one finds on the beach all
sorts of strange flotsam.  Bernard Clowes was a bit of human
wreckage left on the sands of society by the storm of the war.
When it broke out he was a second lieutenant in the Winchester
Regiment, a keen polo player and first class batsman who rarely
opened a book.  He was sent out with the First Division and
carried himself with his usual phlegmatic good humour through
almost four years of fighting from Mons to Cambrai.

In the March break-through he had his wrist broken by a rifle-bullet
and was invalided home, where he took advantage of his leave to get
married, partly because most of the men he knew were already married,
and partly to please his sister. There were no other brothers, and
Mrs. Morrison, a practical lady, but always a little regretful of her
own marriage with Morrison's Boot and Shoe Company, recommended him
with the family bluntness to arrange for an olive branch before the
Huns got him.

Laura, a penniless woman two years his senior and handicapped by
her disreputable belongings, was not the wife Gertrude Morrison
would have chosen for him: still it might have been worse, for
Laura was well-born and personally irreproachable, while Clowes,
hot-blooded and casual, was as likely as not to have married a
chorus-girl.  If any disappointment lingered, Gertrude soothed
it by trying over in her own mind the irritation that she would
be able to produce in Morrison circles: "Where he met her?
Oh, when she was staying with her married sister at Castle
Wharton . . . .Yvonne, the elder Selincourt girl, married into
the Bendish family."

Bernard did not care a straw either for the paternal handicap or
for the glories of the Wharton connection.  He took his
love-affair as simply as his cricket and with the same bold
confidence. Laura was what he wanted; she would fit into her
surroundings at Wanhope as delicately as an old picture fits
into an old frame, and one could leave her about--so he put
it to himself--without fear of her getting damaged.  When Tom
Morrison, shrewd business man, dropped a hint about the rashness
of marrying the daughter of a scamp like Ferdinand Selincourt,
Bernard merely stared at him and let the indiscretion go in
silence.  He can scarcely be said to have loved his bride, for
up to the time of the wedding his nature was not much more
developed than that of a prize bull, but he considered her a
very pretty woman, and his faith in her was a religion.

So they were married, and went to Eastbourne for their honeymoon:
an average match, not marked by passion on either side, but
destined apparently to an average amount of comfort and good
will.  They had ten gay days before Laura was left on a victoria
platform, gallantly smiling with pale lips and waving her
handkerchief after the train that carried Bernard back to the
front.

Five months later on the eve of the Armistice he was flung out
of the service, a broken man, paralysed below the waist, cursing
every one who came near him and chiefly the surgeons for not
letting him die.  No one ever desired life more passionately than
Bernard desired death.  For some time he clung to the hope that
his mind would wear his body out.  But his body was too young,
too strong, too tenacious of earth to be betrayed by the renegade
mind.

There came a day when Clowes felt his youth welling up in him
like sap in a fallen tree: new energy throbbed in his veins, his
heart beat strong and even, it was hard to believe that he could
not get off his bed if he liked and go down to the playing fields
or throw his leg over a horse.  This mood fastened on him without
warning in a Surbiton hospital after a calm night without a
sleeping draught, when through his open window he could see green
branches waving in sunlight, and hear the cries of men playing
cricket and the smack of the driven ball: and it was torture.
Tears forced their way suddenly into Bernard's eyes.  His nurse,
who had watched not a few reluctant recoveries, went out of the
room.  Then his great chest heaved, and he sobbed aloud, lying
on his back with face unhidden, his wide black eyes blinking at
the sweet pale June sky.  No chance of death for him: he was good
for ten, twenty, fifty years more:  he could not bear it, but it
had to be borne.  He tried to pull himself up: if he could only
have reached the window!  But the arms that felt so strong were
as weak as an infant's, while the dead weight of his helpless
legs dragged on him like lead.  The only result of his struggle
was a dreadful access of pain.  Reaction followed, for he had
learnt in his A B C days not to whimper when he was hurt, and by
the time the nurse returned Clowes had scourged himself back to
his usual savage tranquillity.  "Can I have that window shut,
please?" he asked, cynically frank. "I used to play cricket
myself."

Laura Clowes in this period went through an experience almost
equally formative. Two years older than Bernard, she was also
more mature for her years and had developed more evenly, and from
the outset her engagement and marriage had meant more to her then
to Bernard, because her girlhood had been unhappy and they provided
a way of escape.  Her sister Yvonne had met Jack Bendish at a
race-meeting and he had fallen madly in love with her and married
her in a month in the teeth of opposition.  That was luck--heaven-sent
luck, for Yvonne on the night before her marriage had broken down
utterly and confessed that if Jack had not saved her she would have
gone off with the first man who asked her on any terms, because she
was twenty-nine and sick to death of wandering with her father on the
outskirts of society.  Subsequently Yvonne had after a hard fight won
a footing at Wharton for herself and her sister, and there Laura had
met Clowes, not such a social prize as Jack, but rich and able to
give his wife an assured position.  She was shrewd and realized that
in himself he had little to offer beyond a handsome and highly
trained physique and a mind that worked lucidly within the limits of
a narrow imagination but she was beyond all words grateful to him,
and he fascinated her more than she realized.

The ten days at Eastbourne opened her eyes.  Bernard enjoyed
every minute of them and was exceedingly pleased with himself
and proud of his wife, but for Laura they were a time of heavy
strain.  Innocent and shy, she had feared her husband, only to
discover that she loved him better than he was capable of loving
her.  Laura was not blind.  She understood Bernard and all his
limitations, the dangerous grip that his passions had of him,
his boyish impatience, his wild-bull courage, and his inability
to distinguish between a wife and a mistress: she was happiest
when he slept, always holding her in his arms, exacting even in
sleep, but so naively youthful in the bloom of his four and
twenty summers, and, for the moment, all her own.  She loved him
"because I am I--because you are you," and her tenderness was
edged with the profound pity that women felt in those days for
the men who came to them under the shadow of death.  It was her
hope that the strong half-developed nature would grow to meet her
need.  It grew swiftly enough: in the forcing-house of pain he
soon learned to think and to feel: but the change did not lead
him to his wife's heart.

Laura had married a man of a class and apparently normal to a
fault: she found herself united now to incarnate storm and
tempest.  The first time she saw him at Surbiton, he drove her
out in five minutes with curses and insult.  Why?  Laura,
wandering about half-stunned in the visitors' room, had no idea
why.  She stumbled against the furniture: she looked at the
photographs of Windermere and King's College Chapel and the
Nursing Staff on the walls: she took up Punch and began to read
it.  Laura was no dreamer, she had never doubted that her husband
would rather have the use of his legs again than all the feminine
devotion in the world, but she had hoped to soothe him, perhaps
for a little while to make him forget:  it had not crossed her
mind that her anguish of love and service would be rejected.
Enlightenment was like folding a sword to her breast.

By and by his nurse came down to her, a young hard-looking woman
with tired eyes.  She had little comfort to give, but what she
gave Laura never forgot, because it was the truth without any
conventional or sentimental gloss.  "You're having a bad time
with him, aren't you?" she said, coldly sympathetic.  "It won't
last.  Nothing lasts.  You mustn't think he's left off caring for
you.  I expect he was very fond of you, wasn't he?  That's the
trouble. Some men take invalid life nicely and let their wives
fuss over them to their hearts' content, but Major Clowes is one
of those tremendously strong masculine men that always want to be
top dog.  Besides, you're young and pretty, if you don't mind my
saying so, and you remind him of what he's done out of . . .
Twenty-four, isn't he?  Don't give way, Mrs. Clowes,  you've a
long road before you; these paralysis cases are a frightful
worry, almost as bad for the friends as they are for the patient;
but if you play up it'll get better instead of worse.  He'll get
used to it and so will you.  One gets used to anything."

Even so: time goes on and storms subside.  Bernard Clowes came
out of the hospital and he and his wife settled down on friendly
terms after all. "It's not what you bargained for when you
married me," said the cripple with his hard smile. "However, it's
no good crying over spilt milk, and you must console yourself
with the fact that there's still plenty of money going.  But I
wish we'd had a little more time together first." He pierced her
with his black eyes, restless and fiery.  "I dare say you would
have liked a boy.  So should I.  Nevermind, my girl, you shan't
miss much else."

Wanhope, the family property, was buried deep in Wiltshire, three
or four miles from a station.  Laura liked the country: Wanhope
let it be, then: and Wanhope it was, with the additional
advantage that Yvonne was at Castle Wharton within a stroll.
Laura liked a wide house and airy rooms, a wide garden, plenty of
land, privacy from her neighbours: all this Wanhope gave her, no
slight relief to a girl who had been brought up between Brighton
and Monte Carlo. The place was too big to be run without an
agent?  No drawback, the agent: on the contrary, Clowes looked
out for a fellow who would be useful to Laura, a gentleman, an
unmarried man, who would be available to ride with her or make a
fourth at bridge--and there by good luck was Val Stafford ready
to hand.  Born and reared in the country, though young and
untrained, Val brought to his job a wide casual knowledge of
local conditions and a natural head for business, and was only
too glad to squire Laura in the hunting field.  For Laura must
hunt: as Laura Selincourt she had hunted whenever she was offered
a mount, and she was to go on doing as she had always done.
Laura would rather not have hunted, for the freshness of her
youth was gone and the strain of her life left her permanently
tired, and she pleaded first expense, then propriety.  "Don't be
a damned fool," replied Bernard Clowes.  So Laura went riding
with Val Stafford.

"Come in," said Major Clowes in a rasping snarl, and Laura came
into her husband's room and stumbled over a chair.  The windows
were shuttered and the room was still dark at eleven o'clock of a
fine June morning.  Laura, irrepressibly annoyed, groped her way
through a disorder of furniture, which seemed, as furniture
always does in the dark, to be out of place and malevolently full
of corners, and without asking leave flung down a shutter and
flung up a window.  In a field across the river they were cutting
hay, and the dry summer smell of it breathed in, and with it the
long rolling whirr of a haymaking machine and its periodical
clash, most familiar of summer noises.  And the June daylight lit
up the gaunt body of Bernard Clowes stretched out on a water
mattress, his silk jacket unbuttoned over his strong, haggard
throat.  "Really, Berns," said Laura, flinging down a second
shutter, "I don't wonder you sleep badly.  The room is positively
stuffy!  I should have a racking headache if I slept in it."

"Well, you don't, you see," Bernard replied politely.  "Stop
pulling those blinds about.  Come over here." Laura came to him.
"Kiss me," said Clowes, and she laid her cool lips on his cheek.
Clowes received her kiss passively: even Laura,  though she
understood him pretty well, never was sure whether he made her
kiss him because he liked it or because he thought she did not
like it.

"Where are you off to now?" asked Clowes, pushing her away: "you
look very smart. I like that cotton dress.  It is cotton, isn't
it?" he rubbed the fabric gingerly between his finger and thumb.
"Did Catherine make it?  That girl is a jewel. I like that gipsy
hat too, it's a pretty shape and it shades your eyes.  I call
that sensible, which can't often be said for a woman's clothes.
You have good eyes, Laura, well worth shading, though your figure
is your trump card.  I like these fitting bodices that give a
woman a chance to show what shape she is.  All you Selincourt
women score in evening gowns.  Yvonne has a topping figure,
though she's an ugly little devil.  She has an American
complexion and her eyes aren't as good as yours.  Where did you
say you were going?"

"To the station to meet Lawrence. I promised to fetch him in the
car."

"Lawrence?  So he's due today, is he?  I'd forgotten all about
him.  And you're meeting him?  Oh yes, that explains the dress
and hat,  I thought you wouldn't have put them on for my
benefit."

"Dear, it's only one of the cotton frocks I wear every day, and I
couldn't go driving without a hat, could I?"

"Can't conceive why you want to go at all."  Laura was silent.
"If Lawrence must be met, why can't Miller go alone?" Miller was
the chauffeur.  "Undignified, I call it, the way you women run
after a man nowadays.  You think men like it but they don't."

Laura wondered if she dared tell him not to be silly.  He might
take it with a grin, in which case he would probably relent and
let her go: or--?  The field of alternative conjecture was wide.
In the end Laura, whose knee was still aching from her adventure
with the chair, decided to chance it.  But--perhaps because they
were suffused with irritation--the words had no sooner left her
lips than she regretted them.

"I won't have it." Bernard's heavy jaw was clenched like a
bloodhound's. "It's not decent running after Hyde while I'm tied
here by the leg. I won't have you set all the village talking.
There's the Times on my table.  Stop. Where are you going?"

"To ring the bell.  It's time Miller started. You don't want your
cousin to find no one there to meet him--not even a cart for his
luggage."

"He can walk.  Do him good: and Miller can fetch the luggage
afterwards.  You do as I tell you.  Take the Times.  Sit down in
that chair with your face to the light and read me the leading
articles and the rest of the news on Page 7. Don't gabble: read
distinctly if you can--you're supposed to be an educated woman,
aren't you?"

Poor Laura had been looking forward to her drive.  She had taken
some innocent pleasure in choosing the prettiest of her morning
dresses, a gingham that fell into soft folds the colour of a
periwinkle, and in rearranging the liberty scarf on her drooping
gipsy straw, and in putting on her long fringed gauntlets and
little country shoes.  Her husband's compliments made her wince,
Jack Bendish had eyes only for his wife, Val Stafford's
admiration was sweet but indiscriminate: but she remembered
Lawrence as a connoisseur.  And worse than the sting of her own
small disappointment were the breaking of her promise to
Lawrence, the failure in hospitality, in common courtesy.

And for the thousandth time Laura wondered whether it would not
have been better for Bernard, in the long run, to defy his
senseless tyranny.  He was at her mercy: it would have been easy
to defy him.  Easy, but how cruel!  A trained nurse would have
made short work of Bernard's whims, he would have been washed and
brushed and fed and exercised and disregarded--till he died
under it?   Perhaps.  It was safer at all events to let him go
his own way.  He could never hope to command his regiment now:
let him get what satisfaction he could out of commanding his
wife!  She would have preferred a form of sacrifice which looked
less like fear, but there was little sentiment in Bernard, and
love must not pick and choose.  For it was love still, the old
inexplicable fascination: in the middle of one of his tirades,
when he was at his most wayward, she would lose herself in the
contemplation of some small physical trait, the scar of a burn on
his wrist or the tiny trefoil-shaped birthmark on his temple, as
if that summed up for her the essence of his personality, and
were more truly Bernard Clowes then his intemperate insignificance
of speech. . . . Even when others suffered for it she yielded to
Bernard, because she loved him and because he suffered so infinitely
worse than they.

For denial maddened him.  He raised himself on his arm, crimson
with anger, his chest heaving under the thin silken jacket which
defined his gaunt ribs--"Sit down, will you, damn you?" Because
Laura believed that she and she only stood between  her husband
and despair, she yielded and began to read out the Times leader
in a voice that was perfectly gentle and placid.

Bernard sank back and watched her like a cat after a mouse.  He
was under no delusion: he knew she was not cowed or nervous, but
that the spring of her devotion was pity--pity ever fed anew by
his dreadful helplessness: and it was this knowledge that drove
him into brutality.  The instincts of possession and domination
were strong in him, and but for the accident that wrenched his
mind awry he would probably have made himself a king to Laura,
for, once her master, he would have grown more gentle and more
tender as the years went by, while Laura was one of those women
who find happiness in love and duty: not a weak woman, not a
coward, but a humble-minded woman with no great opinion of her
own judgment, who would have liked to look up to father, brother,
sister, husband, as better and wiser than herself. But in his
present avatar he could not master her: and Clowes, feeling as
she felt, seeing himself as she saw him, came sometimes as near
madness as any man out of an asylum.  He was not far off it now,
though he lay quiet enough, with not one grain of expression in
his cold black eyes.

The 11:39 pulled up at Countisford station, and Lawrence Hyde got
out of a first class smoking carriage and stood at ease, waiting
for his servant to come and look after him.  "There'll be a car
waiting from Wanhope, Gaston--"

"Zere no car 'ere, M'sieu--ze man say."

"What, no one to meet me?" Evidently no one: there were not half
a dozen people on the flower-bordered platform, and those few
were country folk with bundles and bags.  Lawrence strolled out
into the yard, hoping that his servant's incorrigibly lame
English might have led to a misunderstanding.  But there was no
vehicle of any kind, and the station master could not recommend a
cab.  Countisford was a small village, smaller even than
Chilmark, and owed the distinction of the railway solely to its
being in the flat country under the Plain.  "But you don't mean
to say," said Lawrence incredulous, "that I shall have to walk?"

But it seemed there was no help for it, unless he preferred to
sit in the station while a small boy on a bicycle was despatched
to Chilmark for the fly from the Prince of Wales's Feathers; and
in the end Lawrence went afoot, though his expression when faced
with four miles of dusty road would have moved pity in any heart
but that of his little valet.  Hyde was one of those men who
change their habits when they change their clothes.  He did not
care what happened to him when he was out of England, following
the Alaskan trail in eighty degrees of frost, or thrashing round
the Horn in a tramp steamer, but when he shaved off his beard,
and put on silk underclothing and the tweeds of Sackville Street,
he grew as lazy as any flaneur of the pavement.  Gaston however
was not sympathetic. He was always glad when anything unpleasant
happened to his master.

Leaving Gaston to sit on the luggage, Lawrence swung off with his
long even stride, flicking with his stick at the bachelor's
buttons in the hedge.  He could not miss his way, said the
station master: straight down the main road for a couple of
miles, then the first turning on the left and the first on the
left again.  Some half a mile out of Countisford however Lawrence
came on a signpost and with the traveller's instinct stopped to
read it:

              WINCANTON              8 M.
              CASTLE WHARTON         3 1/2 M.
              CHILMARK               3 M.

So ran the clear lettering on the southern arm.  Eastwards a much
more weatherbeaten arm, pointing crookedly up a stony cart track,
said in dim brown characters: "CHILMARK 2 M." Plainly a short cut
over the moor!  Better stones underfoot than padded dust: and
Lawrence struck uphill swiftly, glad to escape from the traffic
of the London road.  But he knew too much about short cuts to be
surprised when, after climbing five hundred feet in twice as many
yards--for the gradients off the Plain are steep--he found
himself adrift on the open moor, his track going five ways at
once in the light dry grass.

He halted, leaning on his stick.  He was on the edge of the
Plain: below him stretched away a great half-ring of cultivated
country, its saliencies the square tower of a church jutting over
a group of elms, or the glint of light on a stream, or pale
haystacks dotted round the disorderly yard of a grange--the
tillage and the quiet dwellings of close on a thousand years.
On all this Lawrence Hyde looked with the reflective smile of an
alien.  It touched him, but to revolt.  More than a child of the
soil he felt the charm of its tranquillity, but he felt it also
as an oppression, a limitation: an ordered littleness from which
world-interests were excluded.  He was a lover of art and a
cosmopolitan, and though the lowland landscape was itself a piece
of art, and perfect in its way, Hyde's mind found no home in it.
Yet, he reflected with his tolerant smile, he had fought for it,
and was ready any day to fight for it again--for stability and
tradition, the Game Laws, the Established Church, and the
rotation of crops.  He was the son of an English mother and had
received the training of an Englishman.  A rather cynical smile,
now and then, at the random and diffident ways of England was the
only freedom he allowed to the foreign strain within him.

And when he looked the other way even this faint feeling of
irritation passed off, blown away by the wind that always blows
across a moor, thin and sweet now, and sunlit as the light curled
clouds that it carried overhead through the profound June blue.
Acres upon acres of pale sward, sown all over with the blue of
scabious and the lemon-yellow of hawkweed, stretched away in
rolling undulations like the plain of the sea; dense woods hung
massed on the far horizon, beech-woods, sapphire blue beyond the
pale silver and amber, of the middle distance, and under them a
puff of white smoke from a passing train, or was it the white
scar of a quarry?  He could not be sure across so many miles of
sunlit air, but it must have been smoke, for it dissolved slowly
away till there was no gleam left under the brown hillside.  Here
too was stability, permanence: the wind ruffling the grass as it
had done when the Normans crossed their not far distant Channel,
or rattling over hilltops through leather-coated oak groves which
had kept their symmetry since their progenitors were planted by
the Druids.  Here was nothing to cramp the mind: here was the
England that has absorbed Celt, Saxon, Fleming, Norman,
generation after generation, each with its passing form of
political faith: the England of traditional eld, the beloved
country.

In the meanwhile Lawrence had to find Chilmark.  He had neither
map nor compass and was unfamiliar with the lie of the land, but,
mindful of the station master's directions to go south and turn
twice to the left, he shaped a course south-east and looked for a
shepherd to ask his way of.  At present there were no shepherds
to be seen and no houses; here and there a trail of smoke marked
some hidden hamlet, sunk deep in cup or cranny, but which was
Chilmark he could not tell.  Down went the track, plunging
towards a stream that brawled in a wild bottom: up over a rough
hillside ruby-red with willowherb: then down again to a pool
shaded by two willows and a silver birch, and lying so cool and
solitary in its own cloven nook, bounded in every direction by
half a furlong of chalky hillside, that Lawrence was seized with
a desire to strip and bathe, and sun himself dry on the brilliant
mossy lawn at its brink.  But out of regard for the Wanhope lunch
hour he walked on, following a trickle of water between reeds and
knotgrafis, till in the next winding of the glen he came on a
house: only a labourer's cot, two rooms below and one above, but
inhabited, for smoke was coming out of the chimney.  Lawrence
turned up a worn thread of path and knocked with his stick at the
open door.

It was answered by a tall young girl with a dirty face, wearing a
serge skirt pinned up under a dirty apron.  The house was dirty
too: the smell of an unwashed, unswept interior came out of it,
together with the wailing of a fretful baby.  "I've missed my
way on the moor," said Lawrence, inobtrusively holding his
handkerchief to his nose. "Can you direct me to Chilmark?"

"Do you mean Chilmark or Castle Wharton?  Oh Dorrie, don't cry!"
She lifted the babe on her arm and stood gazing at Lawrence in a
leisured and friendly manner, as if she wondered who he were. "It
isn't far, but it's a long rambling village and there are any
number of paths down.  And if you want the Bendishes--" Evidently
she thought he must want the Bendishes, and perhaps Lawrence's
judgment was a little bribed by her artless compliment, for at
this point he began to think her pretty in an undeveloped way:
certainly she had lovely eyes, dark blue under black lashes,
which reminded him of other eyes that he had seen long ago--but
when?  He could not remember those wistful eyes in any other
woman's face.

"I'm making for Wanhope--Major Clowe's house."

"Oh, but then you must be Captain Hyde," exclaimed Miss
Stafford:  "aren't you? that Mrs. Clowes was expecting."

"My name is Hyde.  No one met me at the station" in spite of
himself Lawrence could not keep his grievance out of his voice
"so, as there are no cabs at Countisford, I had to walk."

"Oh! dear, how sad: and on such a hot day too!  You'll be so
tired." Was this satire?  Pert little thing!  Lawrence was
faintly amused--not irritated, because she was certainly very
pretty: what a swan's throat she had under her holland blouse,
and what a smooth slope of neck!  But for all that she ought to
have sirred him.

"So you know Mrs. Clowes, do you?" He said with as much
politeness as a little girl deserves who has lovely eyes and a
dirty face.  It had crossed his mind that she might be one of the
servants at Wanhope: he knew next to nothing of the English
labouring classes, but was not without experience of lady's
maids.

"Yes, I know her," said Isabel.  She hung on the brink of
introducing herself--was not Captain Hyde coming to tea with her
that afternoon?--but was deterred by a very unusual feeling of
constraint.  She was not accustomed to be watched as Hyde was
watching her, and she felt shy and restless, though she knew not
why.  It never entered her head that he had taken her for Dorrie
Drury's sister.  She was dressed like a servant, but what of
that?  In Chilmark she would have remained "Miss Isabel" if she
had gone about in rags, and it would have wounded her bitterly to
learn that she owed the deference of the parish rather to her
rank as the vicar's daughter, who visited at Wanhope and Wharton,
than to any dignity of her own.  In all her young life no one had
ever taken a liberty with Isabel.  And, for that matter, why
should any one take a liberty with Dorrie Drury's sister?
Isabel's father would not have done so, nor her brothers, nor
indeed Jack Bendish, and she was too ignorant of other men to
know what it was that made her so hot under Hyde's eyes.  "But
you'll be late for lunch. Wait half a minute and I'll run up with
you to the top of the glen."

Lawrence watched her wrap her charge carefully in a shawl, and
fetch milk from the dresser, and coax till Dorrie turned her
small head, heavy with the cares of neglected babyhood, sideways
on the old plaid maud and began to suck.  Apparently he had
interrupted the scrubbing of the kitchen floor,  for the tiles
were wet three quarters of the way over, and on a dry oasis stood
a pail, a scrubbing brush, and a morsel of soap.  Among less
honourable odours he was glad to distinguish a good strong whiff
of carbolic.

Isabel meanwhile had recovered from her little fit of shyness.
She pulled off her apron and pulled down her skirt (it had been
kilted to the knee), rinsed her hands under a tap, wiped her face
with a wet handkerchief, and came out into the June sunshine
bareheaded, her long pigtail swinging between drilled and slender
shoulders.  "Yours are London boots," she remarked as she
buttoned her cuff.  "Do you mind going over the marsh?"

"Not at all."

"Not if you get your feet wet?" Lawrence laughed outright.  "But
it's a real marsh!" said Isabel offended: "and you're not used to
mud, are you?  You don't look as if you were." She pointed down
the glen, and Lawrence saw that some high spring, dammed at its
exit and turned back on itself, had filled the wide bottom with a
sponge of moss thickset with flowering rush and silken fluff of
cotton grass.  "There's no danger in summertime, the shepherds
often cross it and so do I.  Still if you're afraid--"

"I assure you I'm not afraid," said Lawrence, looking at her so
oddly that Isabel was not sure whether he was angry or amused.
Nor was Lawrence.  She had struck out of his male vanity a
resentment so crude that he was ashamed of it, ashamed or even
shocked?  He was not readily shocked.  A pure cynic, he let into
his mind, on an easy footing, primitive desires that the average
man admits only behind a screen.  Yet when these libertine
fancies played over Isabel's innocent head they were distasteful
to him:  as he remembered once, in a Barbizon studio, to have
knocked a man down for a Gallic jest on the Queen of Heaven
although Luke's Evangel meant no more to him than the legend of
Eros and Psyche.  But one can't knock oneself down--more's the
pity!

"Oh, all right," said Isabel impatiently.  He was watching her
again!  "But do look where you're going, this isn't Piccadilly.
You had better hold my hand."

Lawrence was six and thirty.  At eighteen he would have snatched
her up and carried her over: at thirty-six he said: "Thanks very
much," touched the tips of her fingers, let them fall. . . .
Unfortunately however he weighed more than Isabel or the
shepherds, and, half way across, the green floor quietly gave way
under him: first one foot immersed itself with a gentle splash
and then the other--"Oh dear" said Isabel, seized with a great
disposition to laugh. Lawrence was not amused.  His boots were
full of mud and water and he had an aching sense of injured
dignity.  The bog was not even dangerous: and ankle-deep,
calf-deep, knee-deep he waded through it and got out on the
opposite bank, bringing up a cloud of little marsh-bubbles on his
heels.  Isabel would have given all the money she had in the
world--about five shillings to go away and laugh, but she had
been well brought up and she remained grave, though she grew very
red.

"I am so sorry!" she faltered, looking up at Lawrence with her
beautiful sympathetic eyes (one must never say I told you so).
"I never thought you really would go in.  You must be very heavy!
Oh! dear, I'm afraid you've spoilt your trousers, and it was all
my fault.  Oh! dear, I hope you won't catch cold.  Do you catch
cold easily?"

"Oh no, thanks.  Do you mind showing me the way to Wanhope?"

Isabel without another word took the steep hillside at a run. In
her decalogue of manners to refuse an apology was an unpardonable
sin.  How differently Val would have behaved!  Val never lost his
temper over trifles, and if anything happened to make him look
ridiculous he was the first to laugh at himself.  At this time in
her life Isabel compared Val with all the other men she met and
much to his advantage.  She forgot that Lawrence was not her
brother and that no man cares to be made ridiculous before a
woman, or rather she never thought of herself as a woman at all.

She pointed east by south across the Plain.  "Do you see that
hawk hovering?  Carry your eye down to the patch of smoke right
under him, in the trees: those are the Wanhope chimneys.  If you
go straight over there till you strike the road, it will bring
you into Chilmark High Street.  Go on past Chapman the draper's
shop, turn sharp down a footpath opposite the Prince of Wales's
Feathers, cross the stream by a footbridge, and you'll be in the
grounds of Wanhope."

"Thank you," said Lawrence, "your directions are most precise."
He had one hand in his pocket feeling among his loose silver:
tips are more easily given than thanks, especially when one is
not feeling grateful, and he was accustomed to pay his way
through the world with the facile profusion of a rich man.  Still
he hesitated: if he had not the refined intuition that would have
made such a blunder impossible to Val Stafford, he had at all
events enough intelligence to hesitate.  There is a coinage that
is safer than silver, and Lawrence thought it might well pass
current (now that she had washed her face) with this fair
schoolgirl of sixteen, ruffled by sun and wind and unaware of her
beauty.  He would not confess to himself that the prospect of
Isabel's confusion pleased him.

He bent his head, smiling into Isabel's eyes. "You're a very kind
little girl.  May I--?"

"No," said Isabel.

The blood sprang to her cheek, but she did not budge, not by a
hair's breadth.  "I beg your pardon," said Lawrence, standing
erect. He had measured in that moment the extent of his error,
and he cursed, not for the first time, his want of perception,
which his ever-candid father had once called a streak of
vulgarity. Defrauded of the pleasure he had promised himself
from the contact of Isabel's smooth cheek, he grew suddenly very
tired of her.  Young girls with their trick of attaching
importance to trifles are a nuisance!

He forced a smile.  "I beg your pardon, I had no idea--  I see
you're ever so much older than I thought you were.  Some day I
shall find my way up here again and you must let me make my peace
with a box of chocolates." He raised his hat--he had not done so
when she opened the door--and swung off across the moor, leaving
the vicar's daughter to go back and scrub Mrs. Drury's floor as
it had never been scrubbed before in its life.  The honours of
the day lay with Isabel, but she was not proud of them, and her
face flamed for the rest of the morning.  "You're worse than
Major Clowes!" she said violently to the kitchen tap.




CHAPTER IV


"How do?" Bernard Clowes was saying an hour later.  "So good of
you to look us up."

Lawrence, coming down from his own room after brushing his muddy
clothes, met his cousin with a good humoured smile which covered
dismay.  Heavens, what a wreck of manhood!  And how chill it
struck indoors, and how dark, after the June sunshine on the
moor! Delicately he took the hand that Clowes held out to him--
but seized in a grip that made him wince.  Clowes gave his curt
"Ha ha!"

"I can still use my arms, Lawrence.  Don't be so timid, I shan't
break to pieces if I'm touched.  It's only these legs of mine
that won't work.  Awkward, isn't it?  But never mind that now,
it's an old story.  You had a mishap on the moor, the servants
tell me?  Ah! while I think of it, let me apologize for leaving
you to walk from the station.  Laura, my wife, you know, forgot
to send the car.  By the by, you know her, don't you?  She says
she met you once or twice before she married me."

Like most men who surrender to their temperaments, Lawrence was
as a rule well served by his intuitions.  Now and again they
failed him as with Isabel, but when his mind was alert it was a
sensitive medium.  He dropped with crossed knees into his chair
and glanced reflectively at Bernard Clowes, heu quantum
mutatus. . . . When the body was wrecked, was there not nine
times out of ten some corresponding mental warp?  Bernard's
fluent geniality struck him as too good to be true--it was not
in Bernard's line: and why translate a close friendship into
"meeting once or twice"? Was Bernard misled or mistaken, or was
he laying a trap?--Not misled: the Laura Selincourt of Hyde's
recollection was not one to stoop to petty shifts.

"'Once or twice?'"  Lawrence echoed: "Oh, much oftener than that!
Mrs. Clowes and I are old friends, at least I hoped we were.  She
can't be so ungracious as to have forgotten me?"

"She seems to have, doesn't she?"  Bernard with his inscrutable
smile let the question drop.  "Just touch that bell, will you,
there's a good fellow? So sorry to make you dance attendance--
Hallo, here she is!"

Laura had been waiting in the parlour, under orders not to enter
till the bell rang.  She had heard all, and wondered whether it
was innocence or subtlety that had walked in and out of Bernard's
trap.  She remembered Hyde was much like other fourth-year
University men except that he was not egotistical and not shy:
he had altered away from his class, but in what direction it was
difficult to tell: there was no deciphering the pleasant
blankness of his features or the conventional smile in his black
eyes.

"I haven't seen you for fourteen years," she said, giving him her
hand.  "Oh Lawrence, how old you make me feel!"

"Shall I swear you haven't changed?  It would be a poor
compliment."

"And one I couldn't return.  I shouldn't have known you, unless
it were by your likeness to Bernard."

"Am I like Bernard?" said Lawrence, startled.

"That's a good joke, isn't it?" said Clowes. "But my wife is
right.  If I were not paralysed, we should be a good bit alike."

Under the casual manner, it was in that moment that Hyde saw his
cousin for what he was: a rebel in agony.  There was a tragedy at
Wanhope then, Lucian Selincourt had not exaggerated.  Though
Lawrence was not naturally sympathetic, he felt an unpleasant
twinge of pity, much the same as when his dog was run over in the
street: a pain in the region of the heart, as well defined as
rheumatism.  In Sally's case, after convincing himself that she
would never get on her legs again, he had eased it by carrying
her to the nearest chemist's: the loving little thing had licked
his hand with her last breath, but when the brightness faded out
of her brown eyes, in his quality of Epicurean, Lawrence had not
let himself grieve over her.  Unluckily one could not pay a
chemist to put Bernard Clowes out of his pain!  "This is going to
be deuced uncomfortable," was the reflection that crossed his
mind in its naked selfishness.  "I wish I had never come near the
place. I'll get away as soon as I can."

Then he saw that Bernard was struggling to turn over on his side,
flapping about with his slow uncouth gestures like a bird with a
broken wing. "Let me--!" Laura's "No, Lawrence!" came too late.
Hyde had taken the cripple in his arms, lifting him like a child:
"You're light for your height," he said softly.  He was as strong
as Barry and as gentle as Val Stafford.  Laura had turned
perfectly white.  She fully expected Clowes to strike his cousin.
She could hardly believe her eyes when with a great gasp of
relief he flung his arm round Hyde's neck and lay back on Hyde's
shoulder.  "Thanks, that's damned comfortable--first easy moment
I've had since last night," he murmured: then, to Laura, "we must
persuade this fellow to stop on a bit.  You're not in a hurry to
get off, are you, Lawrence?"

"Not I. I'll stay as long as you and Laura care to keep me."

"I and Laura, hey?"

Bernard's flush faded: he slipped from Hyde's arm.

"H'm, yes, you're old friends, aren't you?  Met at Farringay?
I'd forgotten that." He shut his eyes.  "And Laura's dying to
renew the intimacy.  It's dull for her down here. Take him into
the garden,  Lally.  You'll excuse me now, Lawrence, I can't talk
long without getting fagged.  Wretched state of things, isn't it?
I'm a vile bad host but I can't help it.  At the present moment
for example I'm undergoing grinding torments and it doesn't amuse
me to make conversation, so you two can cut along and disport
yourselves in any way you like. Give Lawrence a drink, will you,
my love? . . . . Oh no, thanks, you've done a lot but you can't
do any more, no one can, I just have to grin and bear it. Laura,
would you mind ringing for Barry?   I'm not sure I shall show up
again before dinner-time.  It's no end good of you, old chap, to
come to such a beastly house. . ."

He pursued them with banal gratitude till they were out of
earshot, when Lawrence drew a deep breath as if to throw off
some physical oppression.  Under the weathered archway, down the
flagged steps and over the lawn. . . . How still it was, and how
sweet!  The milk-blooms in the spire of the acacia were beginning
to turn faintly brown, but its perfume still hung in the valley
air, mixed with the honey-heavy breath of a great white double
lime tree on the edge of the stream.  There were no dense woods
at Wanhope, the trees were set apart with an airy and graceful
effect, so that one could trace the course of their branches; and
between them were visible hayfields from which the hay had
recently been carried, and the headlands of the Plain--fair
sunny distances, the lowlands bloomed over with summer mist, the
uplands delicately clear like those blue landscapes that in early
Italian pictures lie behind the wheel of Saint Catherine or the
turrets of Saint Barbara.

"A sweet pretty place you have here. I was in China nine weeks
ago.  Everlasting mud huts and millet fields.  I must say there's
nothing  to beat an English June."

"Or a French June?" suggested Laura, her accent faintly sly.
"Lucian said he met you at Auteuil."

"Dear old Lucian!  He seemed very fit, but rather worried about
you, Laura--may I call you Laura?  We're cousins by marriage,
which constitutes a sort of tie.  Besides, you let me at
Farringay."

"Farringay. . . . What a long while ago it seems!  I can't keep
up any pretence of juvenility with you, can I?  We were the same
age then so we're both thirty-six now.  Isn't it strange to think
that half one's life is over?  Mine doesn't seem ever to have
begun.  But you wouldn't feel that: a man's life is so much
fuller than a woman's.  You've been half over the world while
Berns and I have been patiently cultivating our cabbage patch.
I envy you: it would be jolly to have one's mind stored full of
queer foreign adventures and foreign landscapes to think about in
odd moments, even if it were only millet fields."

"I've no ties, you see, nothing to keep me in England.  Come to
think of it, Bernard is my nearest male relative, since my father
died five years ago."

"I heard of that and wanted to write to you, but I wasn't sure of
your address"

"I was in Peru.  They cabled to me to come home when he was taken
ill, but I was up country and missed it.  The first news I had
was a second cable announcing his death.  It was unlucky."

"For both of you," said Laura gently, "if it meant that he was alone
when he died." Sincere herself, Mrs. Clowes exacted from her friends
either sincerity or silence, and her sweet half-melancholy smile
pierced through Hyde's conventional regrets. He was silent, a little
confused.

They were near the river now, and in the pale shadow of the lime
tree Laura sat down on a bench, while Hyde threw himself on a
patch of sunlit turf at her feet.  Most men of his age would have
looked clumsy in such an unbuttoned attitude, but Hyde was an
athlete still, and Laura, who was fond of sketching, admired his
vigorous grace.  She felt intimate with him already: she was not
shy nor was Lawrence, but this was an intimacy of sympathy that
went deeper than the mere trained ease of social intercourse: she
could be herself with him: she could say whatever she liked.
And, looking back on the old days which she had half forgotten,
Laura remembered that she had always felt the same freedom from
constraint in Hyde's company: she had found it pleasant fourteen
years ago, when she was young and had no reserves except a
natural delicacy of mind, and it was pleasant still, but strange,
after the isolating adventure of her marriage.  Perhaps she would
not now have felt it so strongly, if he had not been her
husband's cousin as well as her friend.

She sat with folded hands watching Lawrence with a vague, observant
smile.  Drilled to a stately ease and worn down to a lean hardihood
by his life of war and wandering, he was, like his cousin, a big,
handsome man, but distinguished by the singular combination of black
eyes and fair hair.  Was there a corresponding anomaly in his
temperament?  He looked as though he had lived through many
experiences and had come out of them fortified with philosophy--that
easy negative philosophy of a man of the world, for which death is
only the last incident in life and not the most important. Of
Bernard's hot passions there was not a sign.  Amiable?  Laura fancied
that so far as she was concerned she could count on a personal
amiability: he liked her, she was sure of that, his eyes softened
when he spoke to her.  But the ruck of people?  She doubted whether
Lawrence would have lost his appetite for lunch if they had all been
drowned.

The pleasant, selfish man of the world is a common type, but she
could not confine Lawrence to his type.  He basked in the sun:
with every nerve of his thinly-clad body he relinquished himself
to the contact of the warm grass: deliberately and consciously he
was savouring the honied air, the babble of running water, the
caress of the tiny green blades fresh against his cheek and hand,
the swell of earth that supported his broad, powerful limbs.
This sensuous acceptance of the physical joy of life pleased
Laura, born a Selincourt, bred in France, and temperamentally out
of touch with middle-class England.

Whether one could rely on him for any serviceable friendship
Laura was uncertain.  As a youth he had inclined to idealize
women, but she was suspicious of his later record.  Good or bad
it had left no mark on him.  Probably he had not much principle
where women were concerned.  Few of the men Laura had known in
early life had had any principles of any sort except a common
spirit of kindliness and fair play.  Her brother was always
drifting in and out of amatory entanglements--the hunter or the
hunted--and he was not much the worse for it so far as Laura
could see.  Perhaps Hyde was of the game stamp, in which case
there might well be no lines round his mouth, since lines are
drawn by conflict: or perhaps a wandering life had kept him out
of harm's way.  It made no great odds to Laura--she had not the
shrinking abhorrence which most women feel for that special form
of evil: it was on the same footing in her mind as other errors
to which male human nature is more prone than female, a little
worse than drunkenness but not so bad as cruelty.  From her own
life of serene married maidenhood such sins of the flesh seemed
as remote as murder.

The strong southern light broke in splinters on the dancing
water, and was mirrored in reflected ripplings, silver-pale,
tremulous, over the shadowy understems of grass and loosestrife
on the opposite bank.  "And I never gave you anything to drink
after all!" said Laura after a long, companionable silence.  "Why
didn't you remind me?"

"Because I didn't want it.  Don't you worry: I'll look after
myself. I always do.  I'm a charming guest, no trouble to any
one."

"At least have a cigarette while you're waiting for lunch!  I'm
sorry to have none to offer you."

"Don't you smoke now?  You did at Farringay."

"No, I've given it up. I never much cared for it, and Bernard
does so hate to see a woman smoking. He is very old-fashioned in
some ways."

"And do you always do as Bernard likes?" Lawrence asked with an
impertinence so airy that it left Laura no time to be offended.
"--It was a great shock to me to find him so helpless.  Is he
always like that?"

"He can never get about, if that's what you mean." It was not all
Hyde meant, but Laura had not the heart to repress him; she felt
that thrill of guilty joy which we all feel when some one says
for us what we are too magnanimous to say for ourselves.  "He
lies indoors all day smoking and reading quantities of novels."

"Fearfully sad.  Very galling to the temper.  But there are a lot
of modern mechanical appliances, aren't there, that ought to make
him fairly independent?"

"He won't touch any of them."

"Sick men have their whims.  But can't you drag him out into the
sun?  He ought not to lie in that mausoleum of a hall."

"He has never been in the garden in all our years at Wanhope."

Lawrence took off his straw hat to fan himself with.  It was not
only the heat of the day that oppressed him.  "Poor, wretched
Bernard!  But I dare say I should be equally mulish if I were in
his shoes.  By the by, was he really in pain just now?"

"Really in pain?" Laura echoed.  "Why--why should you say that?"
She no longer doubted Lawrence Hyde's subtlety.  "'He's
constantly in pain and he scarcely ever complains."

"Oh? I didn't know one suffered, with paralysis."

"He has racking neuritis in his shoulders and back."

"That's bad.  I'm afraid he can't be much up to entertaining
visitors.  Does he hate having me here?"

"No! oh no!  I know he sometimes seems a little odd," said poor
Laura, wishing her guest were less clear-sighted: and yet before
he came she had been hoping that Lawrence would divine the less
obvious aspects of the situation, and perhaps, since a man can do
more with a man like Bernard than any woman can, succeed in
easing it.  "But can you wonder?  Struck down like this at five
and twenty! and he never was keen on indoor interests--sport and
his profession were all he cared about.  Please, Lawrence, make
allowances for him--he had been looking forward so much to your
coming here!  A man's society always does him good, and you know
how few men there are in this country: we have only the vicar,
and the doctor, and Jack Bendish and people who stay at the
Castle.  And if you only realized how different he was with you
from what he is with most people, you would be flattered!  He
won't let any one touch him as a rule, except Barry,  whom he
treats like a machine.  But he was quite grateful to you--he
seemed to lean on you."

"Did he?"

She had made Lawrence feel uncomfortable again in the region of
the heart, but he was deliberately stifling pity, as five years
ago, in a Peruvian fonda, he had subdued his filial tenderness
and grief.  He was not callous: if he had had the earlier cable
he would have sailed for home without delay.  But since Andrew
Hyde was dead and would never know whether his son wept for him
or not, Lawrence set himself to repress not only tears but the
fount of human feeling that fed them.  He had dabbled enough in
psychology to know that natural emotions, if not indulged, may
only be driven down under the surface, there to work havoc among
the roots of nerve life.  Lawrence however had no nerves and no
fear of Nemesis, and no inclination to sacrifice himself for
Bernard, and he determined, if Wanhope continued to inspire these
oppressive sensations to send himself a telegram calling him
away.

He changed the subject.  "It's a long while since I've heard
stockdoves cooing.  And, yes, that's a nightingale.  Oh, you
jolly little beggar!" His face fell into boyish creases when he
smiled. "Do you remember the nightingales at Farringay?  Laura--
may I say it?--while rusticating in Arden you haven't forgotten
certain talents you used to possess.  The dress is delightful,
but where the masterhand appears is in the way it's worn.  That
carries me back to Auteull."

"Nonsense!" said Laura, changing her attitude, but not visibly
displeased.

"Oh I shan't say don't move"  Lawrence murmured.  "The slippers
also. . . . Are there many trout in this river, I wonder?  Hallo!
there's a big fellow rubbing along by that black stone!   Must
weigh a cool pound and a half. I suppose the angling rights go
with the property?"

"You can fish all day long if you like: the water is ours, both
sides of it, as far south as the mill above Wharton and a good
half-mile upstream.  The banks are kept clear on principle,
though none of us ever touch a line.  The Castle people come
over now and then: Jack Bendish is keen, and he says our sport
is better than theirs because they fish theirs down too much.
Val put some stock in this spring."

"Val?"

"You seem to fit in so naturally," Laura smiled, "that I forget
you've only just come.  Val is Bernard's agent, and I ought not
to have omitted him from our list of country neighbours, but he's
like one of the family.  Bernard wants you, to meet him because
he was near you in the war.  But I don't know that you'll have
much in common: Val was very junior to you, and he's not keen on
talking about it in any case.  So many men have that shrinking.
Have you, I wonder?"

"I'm afraid I don't take impressions easily. Didn't your friend
enjoy it?"

"He had no chance.  He had only six or seven weeks at the front;
he was barely nineteen, poor boy, when he was invalided out.
That was why Bernard offered him the agency--he was delighted to
lend a helping hand to one of his old brother officers."

"Wounded?"

"Yes, he had his right arm smashed by a revolver bullet.  Then
rheumatic fever set in, and the trouble went to the heart, and he
was very ill for a long time.  I don't suppose he ever has been
so strong as he was before.  What made it so sad was the splendid
way he had just distinguished himself," Laura continued.  She
gave a little sketch of the rescue of Dale, far more vivid than
Val had ever given to his family.  "Perhaps you can imagine what
a fuss Chilmark made over its solitary hero!  We're still proud
of him.  Val is always in request at local shows: he appears on
the platform looking very shy and bored.  Poor boy!  I believe he
sometimes wishes he had never won that embarrassing decoration."

"What's his name?"

"Val Stafford.  Why--do you remember him?"

"Er--yes, I do," said Lawrence.  He took out his cigar case and
turned from Laura to light a cigar.  "I knew a lot of the
Dorchesters. . . Amiable-looking, fair boy, wasn't he?"

"Middle height, and rather sunburnt.  But that description fits
such dozens!  However, I'm taking you up to tea there this
afternoon, if the prospect doesn't bore you, so you'll be able to
judge for yourself.  He has a young sister who threatens to be
very pretty.  Are you still interested in pretty girls, M. le
capitaine?"

"Immensely." Hyde lay back on one arm, smoking rather fast. "I
see no immediate prospect of my being bored, thanks.  Rather fun
running into Stafford again after all these years! I shall love a
chat over old times."  He raised his black eyes, and Laura
started.  Was it her fancy, or a trick of the sunlight, that
conjured up in them that sparkle of smiling cruelty, gone before
she could fix it?  "You say he doesn't care to talk about his
military exploits?  He always was a modest youth, I should love
to see him on a recruiting platform.  Wait till I get him to
myself, he won't be shy with me.  Did you tell him I was coming?"

"I told his sister Isabel, who probably told him. I haven't seen
him since, he hasn't happened to come in; I suppose the hay
harvest has kept him extra busy--Dear me! why, there he is!"

In the field across the stream a young man on horseback had come
into view.  Catching sight of Laura he slipped across a low
boundary wall, his brown mare, a thoroughbred, changing her feet
in a ladylike way on the worn stones, and trotted down to the
riverbank, raising his cap.

"Coming in to lunch, Val?" Laura called across the water.

"Thank you very much, I'm afraid I shan't have time."

"But you haven't been in since Sunday!"  Laura's accent was
reproachful.  "Why are you forsaking us?  We need you more than
the farm does!"

Val's pleasant laugh was the avoidance of an answer.  "So sorry!
But I can't come in now, Laura: I have to go over to Countisford
to talk to Bishop about the new tractor, and I want to get back
by teatime.  Isabel tells me you're bringing Captain Hyde up to
see us." He raised his cap again, smiling directly at Lawrence,
who returned the salute with such gay good humour that Laura was
able to dismiss that first fleeting impression from her mind.
So this was Val Stafford, was it?  And a very personable fellow
too! Hyde had not foreseen that ten years would work as great a
change in Val as in himself, or greater.

"I was going to call on you in due form, sir, but my young
sister hasn't left me the chance.  You haven't forgotten me, have
you?"

"No, I remember you most distinctly.  Delighted to meet you
again."

"Thank you.  The pleasure is mutual.  Now I must push on or I
shall be late."

"He can use his arm, then," said Lawrence, as Val rode away,
jumping his mare over a fence into the road.  "Shaves himself and
all that, I suppose?  He rides well."

"A great deal too well! and rides to hounds too, but he ought not
to do it, and I'm always scolding him.  He can't straighten his
right arm, and has very little power in it.  He was badly thrown
last winter, but directly he got up he was out again on Kitty."

"Living up to his reputation." Lawrence flicked the ash from his
cigar.  "I should have known him anywhere by his eyes."

"He has kept very young, hasn't he?  An uneventful life without
much anxiety does keep people young," philosophized Laura.  "I
feel like a mother to him.  But you'll see more of him this
afternoon."

"So I shall," said Lawrence, "if he isn't detained at
Countisford."




CHAPTER V


The reason why Lawrence found Isabel scrubbing Mrs. Drury's
floor was that Dorrie's pretty, sluttish little mother had been
whisked off to the Cottage Hospital with appendicitis an hour
earlier.  She was in great distress about Dorrie when Isabel,
coming in with the parish magazine, offered to stay while Drury
went to fetch an aunt from Winterbourne Stoke.  When Drury drove
up in a borrowed farm cart, Isabel without expecting or receiving
many thanks dragged her bicycle to the top of the glen and pelted
off across the moor.  Her Sunbeam was worn and old, so old that
it had a fixed wheel, but what was that to Isabel?  She put her
feet up and rattled down the hill, first on the turf and then on
the road, in a happy reliance on her one serviceable brake.

Her father was locked in his study writing a sermon: Isabel
however tumbled in by the window.  She sidled up to Mr. Stafford,
sat on his knee, and wound one arm round his neck.  "Jim
darling," she murmured in his ear, "have you any money?"

"Isabel," said Mr. Stafford, "how often have I told you that I
will  not be interrupted in the middle of my morning's work?  You
come in like a whirlwind, with holes in your stockings--"

Isabel giggled suddenly.  "Never mind, darling, I'll help you
with your sermon.  Whereabouts are you?  Oh!--'I need not tell
you, my friends, the story we all know so well'--Jim, that's
what my tutor calls 'Redundancy and repetition.' You know quite
well you're going to tell us every word of it.  Darling take its
little pen and cross it out--so--with its own nasty little
cross-nibbed J--"

"What do you mean by saying you want money,"  Mr. Stafford
hurriedly changed the subject, "and how much do you want?  The
butcher's bill came to half a sovereign this week, and I must
keep five shillings to take to old Hewitt--"

"I want pounds and pounds."

"My dear!" said Mr. Stafford aghast.  He took off his spectacles
to polish them, and then as he put them on again, "If it's for
that Appleton boy I really can't allow it.  There's nothing
whatever wrong with him but laziness"

"It isn't for Appleton.  It's for me myself."  Isabel sat up
straight, a little flushed.  "I'm growing up.  Isn't it a
nuisance? I want a new dress!  I did think I could carry on till
the winter, but I can't.  Could you let me have enough to buy one
ready-made?  Chapman's have one in their window that would fit me
pretty well.  It's rather dear, but somehow when I make my own
they never come right.  And Rowsley says I look like a scarecrow,
and even Val's been telling me to put my hair up!"

"Put your hair up, my child?  Why, how old are you? I don't like
little girls to be in a hurry to turn into big ones"

"I'm not a little girl," said Isabel shortly.  "I'm nineteen."

"Nineteen? no, surely not!"

"Twenty next December."

"Dear me!" said Mr. Stafford, quite overcome. "How time flies!"
He set her down from his knee and went to his cash box.  "If Val
tells you to put your hair up, no doubt you had better do it." He
paused.  "I don't know whether Val said you ought to have a new
frock, though?  I can't bear spending money on fripperies when
even in our own parish so many people--" Some glimmering
perception reached him of the repressed anguish in Isabel's eyes.
"But of course you must have what you need.  How much is it?"

"1. 11. 6."

"Oh, my dear!  That seems a great deal."

"It isn't really much for a best dress," said poor Isabel.

"But you mustn't be extravagant, darling," said Mr. Stafford
tenderly.  "I see other girls running about in little cotton
dresses or bits of muslin or what not that look very nice--much
nicer on a young girl than 'silksand fine array.' Last time
Yvonne came to tea she wore a little frock as simple as a
child's"

"She did," said Isabel.  "She picked it up in a French sale.  It
was very cheap--only 275 francs."

"Eleven pounds!" Mr. Stafford held up his hands.  "My dear, are
you sure?"

"Quite," said Isabel. Mr. Stafford sighed. "I must speak to
Yvonne.  'How hardly shall they...'"  He took a note out of his
cash box. "Can't you make that do--?" he was beginning when a
qualm of compunction came upon him.  After all it was a long time
since he had given Isabel any money for herself, and there must
be many little odds and ends about a young girl's clothing that
an elderly man wouldn't understand.  He took out a second note
and pressed them both hurriedly into Isabel's palm.  "There! now
run off and don't ask me for another penny for the next
twelvemonth!" he exclaimed, beaming over his generosity though
more than half ashamed of it.  "You extravagant puss, you! dear,
dear, who'd have a daughter?"

Isabel gave him a rather hasty though warm embrace (she was
terribly afraid that his conscience would prick him and that he
would take the second note away again), and flew out of the
window faster than she had come in.  The clock was striking a
quarter past one, and she had to scamper down to Chapman's to buy
the dress, and a length of lilac ribbon for a sash, and a packet
of bronze hairpins, and be back in time to lay the cloth for two
o'clock lunch.  If it is only for idle hands that Satan finds
mischief, he could not have had much satisfaction out of Isabel
Stafford.

Soon after four Mrs. Clowes stepped from her car, shook out her
soft flounces, and led the way across the lawn, Lawrence Hyde in
attendance.  The vicarage was an old-fashioned house too large
for the living, its long front, dotted with rosebushes, rising up
honey-coloured against the clear green of a beech grove.  There
are grand houses that one sees at once will never be comfortable,
and there are unpretentious houses that promise to be cool in
summer and warm in winter and restful all the year round: of such
was Chilmark vicarage, sunning itself in the afternoon clearness,
while faded green sunblinds filled the interior with verdant
shadow, and the smell of sweetbrier and Japanese honeysuckle
breathed round the rough-cast walls.

Isabel had laid tea on the lawn, and Mrs. Clowes smiled to herself
when she saw seven worn deck chairs drawn up round the table; she was
always secretly amused at Isabel in her character of hostess, at the
naive natural confidence with which the young lady scattered
invitations and dispensed hospitality.  But when Isabel came forward
Laura's covert smile passed into irrepressible surprise.  She raised
her eyebrows at Isabel, who replied by an almost imperceptible but
triumphant nod.  In her white and mauve embroidered muslin, her dark
hair accurately parted at the side of her head and drawn back into
what she called a soup plate of plaits, Isabel no longer threatened
to be pretty.  Impelled by that singularly pure benevolence which a
woman who has ceased to hope for happiness feels for the eager
innocence of youth, Laura drew her close and kissed her.  "My sweet,
I'm so glad," she whispered. A bright blush was Isabel's only answer.
Then Mrs. Clowes stepped back and indicated her cavalier, very big
and handsome in white clothes and a Panama hat: "May I introduce--
Captain Hyde, Miss Stafford," with a delicate formality which
thrilled Isabel to her finger-tips.  Let him see if he would call her
a little girl now!

Lawrence recognized Isabel at a glance, but he was not abashed.
He scarcely gave her a second thought till he had satisfied
himself that Val Stafford was not present.  Lawrence smiled, not
at all surprised: he had had a presentiment that Val, the modest
easy-going Val of his recollections, would be detained at
Countisford: too modest by half, if he was shy of meeting an old
friend!  Rowsley Stafford was doing the honours and came forward
to be introduced to Lawrence, a ceremony remarkable only because
they both took an instantaneous dislike to each other.  Lawrence
disliked Rowsley because he was young and well-meaning and the
child of a parsonage, and Rowsley disliked Lawrence because a
manner which owed some of its serenity to his physical advantages,
and his tailor, and his income, irritated the susceptibilities of
the poor man's son.

Poor men's sons were often annoyed by Lawrence Hyde's manner.
Not so Jack Bendish, sprawling in a deck chair which had no
sound pair of notches: not so his wife, Laura's sister, Yvonne of
the Castle, curled up on a moth-eaten tigerskin rug, and clad in
raiment of brown and silver which even Mr. Stafford would not
have credited to Chapman's General Drapery and Grocery Stores.
Isabel was innocently surprised when the Bendishes found they had
met Captain Hyde in town.  Laura's smile was very faintly tinged
with bitterness: she knew of that small world where every one
meets every one, though she had been barred out of it most of her
life, first by her disreputable father and then by the tragedy of
her marriage: Rowsley pulled his tooth-brush moustache and said
nothing.  He was young, but not so young as Isabel, and there
were moments when he felt his own footing at the Castle to be
vaguely anomalous.

However, the talk ran easily.  Lawrence, as was inevitable, sat
down by Yvonne Bendish: she did not raise an eyelash to summon
him, but it seemed to be a natural law that the rich unmarried
man should sit beside her and talk cosmopolitan scandal, and show
a discreet appreciation of her clothing and her eyes.  Meanwhile
the other four conversed with much greater simplicity upon such
homely subjects as the coming school treat and the way Isabel had
done her hair, Rowsley's regimental doings, and a recent turn-up
between Jack Bendish as deputy M. F. H. and Mr. Morley the Jew.

Bernard Clowes had described Mrs. Jack Bendish as a plain little
devil, but as a rule the devilry was more conspicuous than the
plainness.  She was a tall and extremely slight woman, her
features insignificant and her complexion sallow, but her figure
indecorously beautiful under its close French draperies.  And yet
if she had let Lawrence alone he would have gone over to the
other camp. How they laughed, three out of the four of them, and
what marvellous good tea they put away!  The little Stafford girl
had a particularly infectious laugh, a real child's giggle which
doubled her up in her chair.  Lawrence had no desire to join in
the school treat and barnyard conversation, but he would have
liked to sit and listen.

"If no one will have any more tea," said Isabel, jumping up and
shaking the crumbs out of her lap, "will you all come and eat
strawberries?"

"Isn't Val coming in?" asked Laura.

"Not till after five.  He said we weren't to wait for him: he was
delayed in getting off.  He sent his love to you, Laura, and he
was very sorry."

"His love!" said Yvonne Bendish.

"My dear Isabel, I'm sure he didn't," said Laura laughing.

"Kind regards then," said Isabel: "not that it signifies, because
we all do love you, darling.  Val's always telling me that if I
want to be a lady when I grow up I must model my manners on yours.
Not yours, Yvonne."

"After that the least I can do is to wait and give him his tea
when he does appear," said Laura. "It's very hot among the
strawberry beds, and I'm a little tired: and I haven't seen Val
for days."

"No more have I," said Yvonne in her odd drawl, "and I'm tired
too."  Mrs. Jack Bendish was made of whipcord: she had been
brought up to ride Irish horses over Irish fences and to dance all
night, after tramping the moors all day with a gun.  "I'll stay with
you and rest.  Jack, you run on.  Bring me some big ones in a cabbage
leaf.  And, Captain Hyde, you'll find them excellent with bread and
butter." By which Lawrence perceived that his interest in the other
camp had not gone unobserved, and that was the worst of Yvonne:
but--and that was the best of Yvonne: there was no tinge of spite in
her jeering eyes.

So the sisters remained on the lawn, and Jack Bendish, a
perfectly simple young man, walked off with Rowsley to pick a
cabbage leaf.  Isabel was demureness itself as she followed with
Captain Hyde. The embroidered muslin gave her courage, more
courage perhaps than if she could have heard his frank opinion of
it.  "The trailing skirt of the young girl," said Miss Stafford
to herself, "made a gentle frou-frou as she swept over the velvet
lawn." A quoi revent les junes filles?  Very innocent was the
vanity of Isabel's dreams.  She was not strictly pretty, but she
was young and fresh, and the spotless muslin fell in graceful
folds round her tall, lissome figure.  To the jaded man of the
world at her side . . . .  Alas for Isabel!  The jaded man of
the world was a trifle bored: he was easily bored.  He liked
listening to Miss Stafford's artless merriment but he had no
desire to share in it; what had he to say to a promoted
schoolgirl in her Sunday best?

He began politely making conversation.  "What a pretty place this
is!" It seemed wiser not to refer even by way of apology to the
indiscretion of the morning.  "You have a beautiful view over the
Plain.  Rather dreary in winter though, isn't it?"

"I like it best then," said Isabel briefly.  "Don't you want any
strawberries?" She indicated the netted furrows among which
little could be seen of Rowsley and Jack Bendish except their
stern ends.

"No, thanks, I had too much tea." Isabel checked herself on the
brink of reminding him that he had eaten only two cucumber
sandwiches and a macaroon.  In Lawrence Hyde's society her
conversation had not its usual happy flow, she felt tonguetied
and missish.  "How close you are to the Downs here!" They were
following a flagged path between espalier pear trees, and beds of
broccoli and carrots and onions, and borders full of old standard
roses and lavender and sweet herbs and tall lilies; at the end
appeared a wishing gate in a low stone wall, and beyond it,
pathless and sunshiny, the southern stretches of the Plain.  "Are
you a great gardener, Miss Isabel?"

"Some," said Isabel. "I look after my pet vegetables.  The
flowers have to look after themselves.  My father has eruptions
of industry."  She overflowed into a little laugh.  "We don't
encourage him in it.  He had a bad attack of weeding last spring,
and pulled up all my little salads by mistake."  Now that small
tale, she reflected, would have tickled Jack Bendish, but Captain
Hyde, though he smiled at it dutifully, did not seem to be
amused.

"Oh bother you!" Isabel apostrophised him mentally.  "You're not
the grandson of a duke anyhow. I expect you would be nicer if you
were."

She folded her arms on the gate and gazed across the Plain.  The
village below was not far off, but they could see nothing of it,
buried as it was in the river-valley and behind a green arras of
beech leaves: in every other direction, far as the eye could see,
leagues of feathery pale grass besprinkled with blue and yellow
flowers went away in ribbed undulations, occasionally rolling up
into a crest on which a company of fir trees hung like men on
march.  The sun was pale and smudged, the sky veiled: on its
silken pallor floated, here and there, a blot of dark low cloud,
and the clear distances presaged rain.

"May I--?" Lawrence took out his cigarettes. Isabel gave a
grudging assent.  She could not understand how any one could be
willing to taint the sweet summering air that had blown over so
many leagues of grass and flowers.  "Dare I offer you one?"
Lawrence asked, tendering his case.  It was of gold, and bore his
monogram in diamonds. Isabel eyed it scornfully.  Jack Bendish's
was only silver and much scratched and dinted into the bargain.
Now Jack Bendish was the grandson of a duke.

"'No thank you," said Miss Stafford.  "I detest smoking."

 To this Lawrence made no reply at all, no doubt, thought Isabel,
because he did not consider it worth one.  She was proportionally
surprised and a trifle flattered when he replaced the cigarette
to which he had just helped himself. "'The young girl had not
realized her own power.  She was only just coming into her
woman's kingdom.  Her heart beat faster and a vermilion blush
dyed her pale cheek."' Isabel's favourite authors were Stevenson
and Mr. Kipling, but her mental rubric insisted on clothing itself
in the softer style of Molly Bawn.

"I don't detest other people's smoking," she explained in a
rather penitent tone.

"Let's get out on the downs," said Lawrence.  He swung the gate
to and fro for her, then took off his hat and strolled slowly by
her side through the rustling grass.  "Really," he said, more to
himself than to her, "there are places in England that are very
well worth while."

"Worth while what?"

"Er--worth coming to see.  I suppose there isn't much shooting
to be had except rabbits." He swung an imaginary gun to his
shoulder and sighted it at a quarry which seemed to Isabel to be
equally imaginary.  "See him?  Under that heap of stones left of
the beech ring." Isabel's vision was both keen and practised, but
she saw nothing till the rabbit showed his white scut in a
flickering leap to earth.

"You have jolly good eyes," she conceded, still rather
grudgingly.

"So have bunnies, unluckily.  Major Clowes tells me there's
pretty good shooting over Wanhope. I suppose your brother looks
after it, for of course Clowes can do nothing.  It was a great
stroke of luck for my cousin, getting hold of a fellow like Val."

"I don't know about that.  It was a great stroke of luck for
Val."

"I want so much to meet him.  I'm disappointed at missing him this
afternoon. I remember him perfectly in the army, though he was
only a boy then and I wasn't much more myself.  He must be close
on thirty now.  But when I met him this morning it struck me he
hadn't altered much."  Isabel, looking up eager-eyed, felt
faintly and mysteriously chilled.  Was there a point of cruelty
in Hyde's smile? as there was now and then in his cousin's: she
had seen Bernard Clowes watching his wife with the same secret
glow.

"Val is old for his age," she said.  "He always seems much older
than my other brother, although there are only two or three years
between them."

"Probably his spell in the army aged him.  It must have been a
formative experience."

This time Isabel had no doubt about it, there was certainly a
touch of cruel irony in Hyde's soft voice.  Her breath came fast.
"Why do you say that": she cried--"say it like that?"

The smile faded: Lawrence turned, startled out of his self-possession.
"Like what?"

"As if you we're sneering at Val!"

"I?--  My dear Miss Isabel, aren't you a little fanciful?"

Isabel supposed so too, on second thoughts: how could any man
sneer at a record like Val's: unless indeed it were with that
peculiarly graceless sneer which springs from jealousy?  And,
little as she liked Captain Hyde, she could not think him weak
enough for that. She blushed again, this time without any rubric,
and hung her head.  "I'm sorry! But you did say it as if you
didn't mean it.  Perhaps you think we make too much fuss over
Val?  But in these sleepy country villages exciting things don't
happen every day.  I dare say you've had scores of adventures
since that time you met Val.  But Chilmark hasn't had any.  That
makes us remember."

"My dear child," said Lawrence with an earnest gentleness foreign
to his ordinary manner, "you misunderstood me altogether.  I
liked your brother very much.  Remember, I was there when he won
his decoration--" He broke off.  An intensely visual memory had
flashed over him.  Now he knew of whom Isabel had reminded him
that morning:  she had her brother's eyes.

"At the very time?  Were you really?  Do, do, do tell me about
it!  Major Clowes never will--he pretends he can't remember."

"Has Val never told you?"

"Hardly any more than was in the official account--that he was
left between the lines after one of our raids, and went back in
spite of his wound to bring in Mr. Dale.  He had to wait till
after dark?"  Lawrence nodded.. "And 'under particularly trying
conditions.' Why was that?"

"Because Dale was so close to the German lines. He was entangled
in their wire."

Isabel shuddered.  "It seems so long ago.  One can't understand
why such cruelties were ever allowed.  Of course they will never
be again." This naive voice of the younger generation made
Lawrence smile.  "And Val had to cut their wire?"

"To peel it off Dale, or peel Dale off it--what was left of him.
He didn't live more than twenty minutes after he was brought in."

"Did you know Dale?"

"Not well: he was in my cousin's company, not in mine."

"And was Val under fire at the time?"

"Under heavy fire.  The Boches were sending up starshells that
made the place as light as day."

"I can't understand how Val could do it with his broken arm."

"His arm wasn't broken when he cut their wires."

"Oh!  When was it then?"

Hyde flicked with his stick at the airy heads of grass that rose
up thin-sown out of a burnished carpet of lady's slipper.  His
manner was even but his face was dark.  "He had it splintered by
a revolver--shot on his way home, near our lines."

"Oh!  But the Army doctors said the shot must have been fired at
close quarters?"

"There, you see I'm not much of an authority,  am I?  No doubt,
if they said so, they were right.  The fact is I was knocked out
myself that afternoon with a rifle bullet in the ribs.  It was a
hot corner for the Wintons and Dorsets."

"Were you?  I'm sorry." Isabel ran her eyes with a touch of
whimsical solicitude over Hyde's tall easy figure and the
exquisite keeping of his white clothes.  Difficult to connect him
with the bloody disarray of war!  "Were you too left lying
between the lines?"

"With a good many others, English and German.

"There was a fellow near me that hadn't a scratch.  He was
frightened--mad with fear: he lay up in the long grass and wept
most of the day.  I never hated any one so much in my life.  I
could have shot him with pleasure."

"German, of course?"

Hyde smiled.  "German, of course."

"If he had been English he would have deserved to be shot," said
Isabel briefly: then, reverting to a subject in which she was far
more deeply interested, "Rowsley--my second brother--said I
wasn't to cross-examine you: but it was a great temptation,
because one never can get anything out of Val.  And after all
we've the right to be proud of him!  Even then, when every one
was so brave, you would say, wouldn't you, that Val earned his
distinction? It really was what the Gazette called it, 'conspicuous
gallantry'?"

"It was a daring piece of work," said Lawrence, reddening to his
hair.  He fought down a sensation so unfamiliar that he could
scarcely put a name to it, and forced himself on: "We were all proud
of him and we none of us forget it.  Don't tell him I said so,
though.  It isn't etiquette.  You won't think I'm trying to minimize
what Val did, will you, if I say that we who were through the
fighting saw so many horrible and ghastly things . . ."  Again his
voice failed.  He was aware of Isabel's bewilderment, but he was
seeing more ghosts than he had seen in all the intervening years of
peace, and they came between him and the sunlit landscape and
Isabel's young eyes.  War! always war! human bodies torn to rags in a
moment, and the flowers of the field wet with a darker moisture than
rain: the very smell of the trenches was in his nostrils, their odour
of blood and decay.  What in heaven's name had brought it all back,
and, stranger still, what had moved him to speak of it and to betray
feelings whose very existence was unknown to him and which he had
never betrayed before?

The silence was brief though to Lawrence it seemed endless.  He
drove the ghosts back to quarters and finished quietly: "Well, we
won't talk about that, it's not a pleasant subject.  Only give
Val my love and tell him if he doesn't look me up soon I shall
come and call on him.  We're much too old friends to stand on
ceremony."

"All right, I will," said Isabel.

There was a shrub of juniper close by, and she felt under its
sharp branches.  "Do you like honeysuckle?" She held up a fresh
sprig fragrant with its pale horns, which she had tracked to
covert by its scent.  Lawrence was not given to wearing
buttonholes, but he understood the friendly and apologetic
intention and inclined his broad shoulder for Miss Stafford to
pass the stem through the lapel of his coat.  Isabel had not
intended to pin it in for  him, but she was generally willing to
do what was expected of her.  She took a pin from her own dress
(there were plenty in it), and fastened the flower deftly on the
breast of Captain Hyde's white jacket.

And so standing before him, her head bent over her task, she
unwittingly left Lawrence free to observe the texture of her
skin, bloomed over with down like a peach, and the curves of her
young shoulders, a little inclined to stoop, as young backs often
are in the strain of growth, but so firm, so fresh, so white
under the thin stuff of her bodice:  below her silken plaits, on
the nape of her neck, a curl or two of hair grew in close rings,
so fine that it was almost indistinguishable from its own shadow.
Swiftly, without warning, Lawrence was aware of a pleasurable
commotion in his veins, a thrill that shook through him like a
burst of gay music.  This experience was not novel, he had felt
it three or four times before in his life, and on the spot, while
it was sending gentle electric currents to his finger-tips, he
was able to analyse its origin--item, to warm weather and
laziness after the strain of his Chinese journey, so much: item,
to Isabel's promise of beauty, so much: item, to the disparity
between her age and his own, to her ignorance and immaturity, the
bloom on the untouched fruit, so much more.  But there was this
difference between the present and previous occasions when he had
fallen or thought of falling in love, that he desired no victory:
no, it was he and not Isabel who was to capitulate, leaning his
forehead upon her young hand. . . . And he had never seen her
till that morning, and the child was nineteen, the daughter of a
country vicarage, brought up to wear calico and to say her
prayers!  more, she was Val Stafford's sister, and she loved her
brother.  Lawrence gave himself a gentle shake.  At six and
thirty it is time to put away childish things. "Thank you very
much.  Is that Mrs. Clowes calling us?"

It was Laura Clowes and Yvonne Bendish, and Lawrence, as he
strolled back with Isabel to the garden gate, had an uneasy
suspicion that the episode of the honeysuckle had been overseen.
Laura was graver than usual, while Yvonne had a sardonic spark in
her eye.  "I'm afraid it's no use waiting any longer, Isabel,"
said Laura.

"What do you think, Lawrence?  It's after six o'clock."

"Hasn't Val come?" said Isabel.

"No, he must have been kept at Countisford.  It's a long ride for
him on such a hot day.  Perhaps Mrs. Bishop made him stay to
tea."

"As if he would stay with any old Mrs. Bishop when he knew you were
coming here!" said Isabel scornfully.  "Poor old Val, I shan't tell
him how you misjudged him, he'd be so hurt.  But I'll send him down,
shall I, to see you and Captain Hyde after supper?--Tired?  Oh no,
he's never too tired to go to Wanhope."

She kissed Laura, gave Lawrence her sweetest friendly smile, and
returned to the lawn, where Yvonne had apparently taken root upon
her tigerskin.  Isabel heard Rowsley say, "Make her shut up,
Jack," but before she could ask why Yvonne was to be shut up the
daughter of Lilith had opened fire on the daughter of Eve.  "And
what did you think of Lawrence Hyde?" Mrs. Bendish asked,
stretching herself out like a snake and examining Isabel out of
her pale eyes, much the colour of an unripe gooseberry.  "Was he
very attractive?  Oh Isabel! oh Isabel!  I should not have
thought this of one so young."

Isabel considered the point. "I can't understand him," she said
honestly. "I liked parts of him.  He isn't so--so homogeneous as
most people are.

"Did he ask you for the honeysuckle?"

"No, I gave it to him for a peace offering.  I hurt his feelings,
and afterwards I was sorry and wanted to make it up with him.
But would you have thought he had any feelings? any, that is,
that anything I said would hurt?"

"Certainly not," from Rowsley.

"Any woman can hurt any man," said Yvonne.  "But, of course, you
aren't a woman, Isabel.  What was the trouble?"

"Oh, something about the war."

"No, my child, it wasn't about the war.  It was something that
stung up his vanity or his self-love.  Lawrence isn't a
sentimentalist like Jack or Val."  Here Jack Bendish got as far
as an artless "Oh, I say!" but his wife paid no attention.
"Lawrence never took the war seriously."

"But he did," insisted Isabel.  "He coloured all over his face--"

She paused, realizing that Mrs. Bendish, under her mask of
scepticism, was agog with curiosity.  Isabel was not fond of
being drawn out.  Lawrence had given her his confidence, and she
valued it, for with all her ignorance of society she had seen too
much of plain human nature to suppose that he was often taken off
his guard as he had been by her: and was she going to expose him
to Yvonne's lacerating raillery?  A thousand times no!  "I
misunderstood something he said about Val," she continued with
scarcely a break, and falling back on one of those explanations
that deceive the sceptical by their economy of truth.  "It was
stupid of me, and awkward for him, so I had to apologize."

"I see.  Come, Jack." Yvonne rose to her feet,  more like a snake
than ever in her flexibility and swiftness, and held Isabel to
her for a moment, her arm round her young friend's waist.  "But
if you pin any more buttonholes into Captain Hyde's coat," the
last low murmur was only for Isabel's ear, "he will infallibly
kiss you: so now you are forewarned and can choose whether or no
you will continue to pay him these little attentions."

Isabel was not disturbed.  She had early formed the habit of not
attending to Mrs. Bendish, and she unwound herself without even
changing colour.

"You always remind me of Nettie Hills at the Clowes's lodge," she
retorted.  "Mrs. Hills says she's that flighty in the way she
carries on, no one would believe what a good sensible girl she is
under all her nonsense, and walks out with her own young man as
regular as clockwork."




CHAPTER VI


And that evening Val Stafford came to pay his respects to his old
comrade in arms.  Lawrence had travelled so much that it never
took him long to settle down.  Even at Wanhope he managed within
a few hours to make himself at home.  A trap sent over to
Countisford brought back his manservant and an effeminate
quantity of luggage, and by teatime his room was strewn from end
to end with a litter of expensive trifles more proper to a pretty
woman than to a man.  Mrs. Clowes, slipping in to cast a
housewifely glance to his comfort, held up her hands in mock
dismay.  "You must give yourself plenty of time to dust all this
tomorrow morning, Caroline," she said to the house-maid.  She
laughed at the gold brushes and gold manicure set, the polished
array of boots, the fine silk and linen laid out on his bed, the
perfume of sandalwood and Russian leather and eau de cologne.
"And I hope you will be able to make Captain Hyde's valet
comfortable.  Did he say whether he liked his room?"

"I reelly don't know, ma'am,"  replied the truthful Caroline.
"You see he's a foreigner, and most of what he says, well, it
reelly sounds like swearing.

"Madame." It was Gaston himself, appearing from nowhere at
Laura's elbow, and saluting her with an empressement that was
due, if Laura had only known it, to the harmony of her flounces.
Laura eyed the little Gaston kindly.  "You are of the South,
are you not?" she said in her soft French, the French of a
Frenchwoman but for a slight stiffness of disuse: "and are you
comfortable here, Gaston?  You must tell me if there is anything
you want."

Gaston was grateful less for her solicitude than for the sound
of his own language.  When she had left the room he caught up a
photograph, thrust it back into his master's dressingcase, and
spat through the open window--"C'est fini avec toi, vieille
biche," said he: "allons donc! j'aime mieux celle-ci par
exemple."

But, though Laura laughed, it was with indulgence.  While Isabel
and Lawrence were conversing among the juniper bushes, the
Bendishes had given Mrs. Clowes a sketch of Hyde which had
confirmed her own impressions.  Although he liked good food and
wine and cigars, he liked sport and travel too, and music and
painting and books.  His eighty-guinea breechloaders were dearer
to him than the lady of the ivory frame.  Who was the lady of the
ivory frame?  Gaston would have been happy to define with the
leer of the boulevards the relations between his master and
Philippa Cleve.  Gaston had no doubt of them, nor had Frederick
Cleve; Philippa had high hopes; Lawrence alone hung fire.  If he
continued to meet her and she to offer him lavish opportunities
the situation might develop, for Lawrence was not sufficiently
in earnest in any direction to play what has been called the
ill-favoured part of a Joseph, but in his heart of hearts, this
Joseph wished Potiphar would keep his wife in order.  And,
strange to say, Yvonne was not far wide of the mark.  She
believed that Joseph was a sinner but not a willing one: and Jack
Bendish, a little astray among these feminine subtleties,
assented after his fashion--"Hyde's rather an ass in some
ways," he said simply, "but he's an all-round sportsman."

Thus primed, Laura was able to draw out her guest, and dinner
passed off gaily, for Bernard Clowes was no dog in the manger,
and listened with sparkling eyes to adventures that ranged from
Atlantic sailing in a thirty-ton yacht to a Nigerian rhinoceros
shoot.  Nor was Lawrence the focus of the lime-light-he was
unaffectedly modest; but when, in expatiating on a favourite
rifle, he confessed to having held fire till a charging
rhinoceros bull was within eight and twenty yards of him, Bernard
could supply the footnotes for himself. "I knew she wouldn't let
me down," said Lawrence apologetically.  "Ah! she was a bonnie
thing, that old gun of mine.  Ever shoot with a cordite rifle?"
Bernard shook his head.  "I'd like you to see my guns," Lawrence
continued, too shrewd to be tactful. "I'll have them sent down,
shall I? Or Gaston shall run up and fetch 'em. He loves a day in
town."

Under this bracing treatment Bernard became more natural than
Laura had seen him for a long time, and he stayed in the
drawingroom after dinner, chatting with Lawrence and listening to
his wife at the piano, till Laura thought the Golden Age had come
again.  How long would it last?  Philosophers like Laura never
ask that question.  At all events it lasted till half past nine,
when the sick man was honestly tired and the lines of no
fictitious pain were drawn deep about his mouth and eyes.

Mrs. Clowes went away with her husband, who liked to have her at
hand while Barry was getting him to bed, and Lawrence had
strolled out on the lawn, when a shutter was thrown down in
Bernard's room and Laura reappeared at the open window.
"Lawrence, are you there?" she asked, shading her eyes between
her hands.

"Here," said Lawrence removing his cigar.

"Will you be so very kind as to unlock the gate over the
footbridge?  If Val does look us up tonight he's sure to scramble
over it, which is awkward for him with his stiff arm."

She dropped a key down to Lawrence.  A voice--Bernard's called
from within, "Good night, old fellow, thanks for a pleasant
evening.  I'm being washed now."

The night was overcast, warm, quiet, and very dark under the
trees: there was husbandry in heaven, their candles were all out.
And by the bridge under the pleated and tasselled branches of an
alder coppice the river ran quiet as the night, only uttering an
occasional murmur or a deep sucking gurgle when a rotten stick,
framed in foam, span down the silken whirl of an eddy: but
down-stream, where waifs of mist curled like smoke off a grey mirror,
there was a continual talking of open water, small cold river voices
that chattered over a pebbly channel, or heaped themselves up and
died down again in the harsh distant murmur of the weir.  The
quantity of water that passed through the lock gates should have been
constant from minute to minute, but the roar of it was not constant,
nor the pitch of its note, which fell when Lawrence stood erect, but
rose to a shrill overtone when he bent his head: sometimes one would
have thought the river was going down in spate, and then the volume
of sound dwindled to a mere thread, a lisp in the air.  Lawrence was
observing these phenomena with a mind vacant of thought when he heard
footsteps brushing through the grass by the field path from the
village.  Val had come, then, after all!

Val had naturally no idea that any one was near him.  He had
reached the gate and was preparing to vault it when out of the
dense alder-shadow a hand seized his arm.  "So sorry if I
startled you."  But Val was not visibly startled.  "Mrs. Clowes
sent me, down to let you in."

"Did she?  Very good of her, and of you," returned Val's voice,
pleasant and friendly.  "She always expects me to walk into the
river.  But, after all, I shouldn't be drowned if I did.  Is
Clowes gone to bed?"

"He's on his way there.  Did you want to see him?"

"I'll look in for five minutes after Barry has tucked him up.
Have you been introduced to Barry yet?  He's quite a character."

"So I should imagine.  He came in to cart Bernard off, and did
something clumsy, or Bernard said he did, and Bernard cuffed his
head for him.  Barry didn't seem to mind much.  Why does he stay?
Is it devotion?"

"He stays because your cousin pays him twice what he would get
anywhere else.  No, I shouldn't call Barry devoted.  But he does
his work well, and it isn't anybody's job."

"I believe you," Lawrence muttered.

"Warm tonight, isn't it?  No, thanks, I won't have anything to
drink--  I've only just finished supper.  By the by, let me
apologize for my absence this afternoon.  I was most awfully
sorry to miss you, but I never got away from Countisford till
after half past five, and my mare cast a shoe on the way back.
Then I tried to get her shod in Liddiard St. Agnes, which is one
of those idyllic villages that people write books about, and
there I found an Odd-fellows' fete in full swing.  The village
blacksmith was altogether too harmonious for business, so not
being able to cuff his head, like your cousin, I was obliged to
walk home.

"Really'?  Have a cigar if you won't have anything else." Val
accepted one, and in default of a match Lawrence made him light
it from his own.  He was entirely at his ease, though the
situation struck him as bizarre, but he did not believe that Val
was at ease, no, not for all his natural manner and fertility in
commonplace.  Lawrence was faintly sorry for the poor devil, but
only faintly: after all, an awkward interview once in ten years
was a low price to pay for that night which Lawrence never had
forgotten and never would forget. He had an excellent memory,
photographic and phonographic, a gift that wise men covet for
themselves but deprecate in their friends.

Lawrence was no Pharisee, but he was not a Samaritan either.  He
had deliberately set himself to pull up any stray weeds of moral
scruple that lingered in a mind stripped bare of Christian ethic,
a task harder than some realize, since thousands of men who have
no faith in Christ practise virtues that were not known for
virtues by the Western world before Christ came to it.  But every
man is his own special pleader, and Lawrence, whose theory was
that one man is as good as another, retained a good hearty
prejudice against certain forms of moral failure, and excused it
on the ground that it was rather a taste than a principle. He
looked directly into Stafford's eyes as the red glow of the cigar
flamed and faded between the two heads so close together, and in
his own eyes there was the same point of smiling ironic cruelty
that Isabel had read in them--the same as Stafford himself had
read in them not so many years ago.  But apparently Stafford read
nothing in them now.

"Sit down, won't you? you've had a fagging day."  Lawrence
indicated the chairs left on the lawn.  "Hear me beginning to
play the host!  As a matter of fact, you must know your way about
the place far better than I do.  Although we're cousins, Bernard
and I have seen next to nothing of each other since we were boys
at school.  You, Val, must know him better than any one except
his wife.  I want you to tell me about him.  I'm in dangerous
country and I need a map."

"I should be inclined to vary the metaphor a little and call him
an uncharted sea," Val smiled as he threw one leg over the other
and settled himself among his cushions.  He was dead tired,
having been up since six in the morning and on his feet or in
the saddle all day.  "But I'm at your service, subject always to
the proviso that I'm Bernard's agent, which makes my position
rather delicate.  What is it you want to know?"

Since it was whether Clowes behaved decently to his wife,
Lawrence shifted in his chair and flicked the ash from his cigar.
"Imprimis, whether Bernard has a trout rod I can borrow.  I
didn't know there was any fishing to be had or I'd have brought
my own."

"You can have mine: I scarcely ever touch a line now.  Certainly
not in hay-harvest!  I'll send it down for you the first thing--"
Was it possible that he was as insouciant as he professed to be?

"Oh, thanks very much," Hyde cut in swiftly, but I couldn't
borrow yours.  I'll find out if Clowes can't lend me one."

"As you please." Stafford left it at that and passed on. "But I
don't fancy Bernard has ever thrown a line in his life, he is too
energetic to make a fisherman.  By the way, I suppose you won't
be staying any length of time at Wanhope?"

Lawrence smiled, the wish was father to the thought: that was
more like the Val of old times!

"That depends--mainly on my cousin, to be frank: I suspect he'll
soon get sick of having a third person in the house."

"Oh, probably.  But you needn't take any notice of that."
Lawrence looked up in surprise.  "But, perhaps, that is none of
my business.  Or will you let me give you one warning, since
you've asked for a map?  Don't be too prompt to take Bernard at
his word.  He may be very rude to you and yet not want you to go.
He sacks Barry every few weeks. In fact now I come to think of it
I'm under notice myself, for last time I saw him he told me to
look out for another job.  He said what he wanted was a practical
man who knew a little about farming."

"And you stay on?  Quite right, if it suits your book."
Unconsciously putting the worst construction on everything Val
said or did, Lawrence's conclusion was that probably Val, an
amateur farmer, was paid, like Barry, twice what he was worth in
the market.  "But it wouldn't suit mine.  However, I don't
imagine Bernard will try it on with me. I'm not Barry.  If he
hits me I shall hit him back."

"Oh, will you?" returned Val, invisibly amused. "I'm not sure
that wouldn't be a good plan.  It has at least the merit of
originality.  All the same I'm afraid Mrs. Clowes wouldn't like
it, she is a standing obstacle in the way of drastic measures."

"But why do you want me to stay?" Lawrence asked more and more
surprised.

"Well, here is what brought me up tonight, when I knew Bernard
would be on his way to bed.  Will you--" he leaned forward, his
hands clasped between his knees--"stick it out, whatever happens,
for a week or two, and keep your eyes open?  Life at Wanhope
isn't all plain sailing."

"Plain sailing for Bernard?"

"Or for his wife."

"You speak as the friend of the house who sees both sides?"

"They're forced on me."

"I'll stay as long as I'm comfortable," said Lawrence, cynically
frank.  "More I can't promise."

Val leant back with an imperceptible shrug.  He was disappointed
but not surprised: there was in Hyde a vein of hard selfishness--
not a weakness, for the egoism which openly says "I will consult
my own convenience first" is too scornful of public opinion to be
called weak, but an acquired defensive quality on which argument
would have been thrown away.  Val's arm dropped inert, he was
tired, not in body alone, but by the strain of contact with
another mind, hostile, and pitiless, and dominant.

And Lawrence also was content to sit silent, lulled by the rising
and falling murmur of the stream, and by that agreeably cruel
memory. . . .   He had no inclination to recall it to Val, but it
lent an emotional piquancy to their intercourse.  He had the whip
hand of Val through the past, and perhaps the present also.
Lawrence had been struck by Val's allusion to Mrs. Clowes.  He
was the friend of the house, was he?  Now the position of a
friend of the house who shields a wife from her husband is
notoriously a delicate one.

Val roused himself.  "Well, we'll drop this.  I must now say two
words on a different subject: I'd rather let it alone, and so I
dare say would you, but we shall meet a good deal off and on
while you're here, and it had better be got over.  I'm sorry if I
embarrass you--"

"Set your mind at rest," said Lawrence, silkenly brutal.  "You
don't embarrass me at all."

He threw away his cigar and got up laughing, and as Val also rose
Lawrence gently slapped him on the back. "I know what you're
driving at--that you've not forgotten that small indiscretion
of yours, or ceased to regret it.  Don't you worry, Val!  You
always were one of the worrying sort, weren't you?  But you need
never refer to it again, and I won't if you don't." Surely a
generous, a handsome offer!  But Stafford only touched with the
tips of his fingers the ringed and manicured hand of the elder
man.

"Thank you!  But I wasn't going to say anything of the sort.  The
fact is that for a long while I've been making up my mind to see
you some time when you were in England: there was no hurry,
because so long as my father's alive I can do nothing, but when I
heard you were coming to Wanhope the opportunity was too good to
be missed.  Railway fares," Val added with a preoccupied smile,
"are a consideration to me.  So don't walk away yet, Hyde,
please.  I have such a vivid recollection of the last time we met.
Between the lines at dawn.  Do you remember?"

"Everything, Val."

"You were badly hurt, but before you fainted you dragged a
promise out of me."

"Dragged it out of you?" Lawrence repeated: "that's one way of
putting it!"

"But I made some feeble resistance at the time," said Val mildly.
"My head wasn't clear then or for a long while after, but I had
a--a presentiment that it was a mistake.  You meant it kindly."
Had he?  Lawrence laughed.  He had never been able, to analyse
the complex of instincts and passions that had determined his
dealings with Stafford on that dim day between the lines.

"You were in a damned funk weren't you, Val?"

Stafford gave a slight start, the reaction of the prisoner under
a blow.  But apart from the coarse cynicism of it, which
irritated him, it was no more than he had foreseen, and from then
on till the end he did not flinch.

"Yes, anything you like: you can't overstate it. But my point is
that I gave you my parole.  Will you release me from it?"

"Good God!" said Lawrence.

He had never been more surprised in his life. "Come in: let us
talk this over in the light."




CHAPTER VII


Through the open windows of the drawingroom, where candlesticks
of twisted silver glimmered among Laura's old, silvery brocades,
and dim mirrors, and branches of pink and white rosebuds blooming
deliciously in rose-coloured Dubarry jars, the two men came in
together, Lawrence keenly on the watch.  But observation was
wasted on Stafford who had nothing to conceal, who was merely
what he appeared to be, a faded and tired-looking man of middle
height, with blue eyes and brown hair turning grey, and wellworn
evening clothes a trifle rubbed at the cuffs. It was difficult to
connect this gentle and unassuming person with the fiery memory
of the war, and Lawrence without apology took hold of Stafford's
arm like a surgeon and tried to flex the rigid elbow-muscles, and
to distinguish with his fingers used to handling wounds the hard
seams and hollows below its shrunken joint.  The action, which
was overbearing was by no means redeemed by the intention, which
was brutal.

"Surely after all these years you don't propose to confess, Val?"

"I should like to make some sort of amends."

"Too late: these things can never be undone."

"No, of course not.  Undone? no, nothing once done can be undone.

"But one needn't follow a wrong path to the bitter end.  You made
me give you that promise for the sake of discipline and morale.
But of the men who were in the trenches with us that night how
many are left?  Your battalion were pretty badly cut up at
Cambrai, weren't they?  And the survivors are all back in civil
life like ourselves.  If it were to come out now there aren't
twenty men who would remember anything about it: except of course
here in Chilmark, where they know my people so well."

"But you surely don't contemplate writing to the War Office?
I've no idea what course they would take, but they'd be safe to
make themselves unpleasant. I might even come in for a reprimand
myself!  That's a fate I could support with equanimity, but what
about you?  If I were you I shouldn't care to be hauled up for an
interview!"

"Really, if you'll forgive my saying so, I don't want to enter
into contingencies at all.  Give me my promise back, Hyde,
there's a good fellow, it's worth nothing now to anyone but the
owner."

"What about your own people?" said Lawrence, his hands in his
pockets, and falling unawares into the tone of the orderly room.
"You'll do nothing while your father's alive: I'm glad you've
sense enough for that: but what about your brother and sister?
You're suffering under some unpractical attack of remorse, Val,
and like most penitent souls you think of nothing but yourself."

"On the contrary, I shrink very much from bringing distress on
other people.  I'm well aware," said Val slowly, "that a man who
does what I've done forfeits his right to take an easy way out."

"An easy way?"

"Believe me, I haven't found the way you imposed on me an easy
one."

"Poor wretch!" said Lawrence under his breath.  Stafford heard,
perhaps he was meant to hear: and he glanced out over the dark
turf on which the windows traced a golden oblong, over the trees,
dark and mysterious except where the same light caught and
bronzed the tips of their branches.  In its glow every leaf stood
out separate and defined, clearer than by day through the
contrast of the immense surrounding darkness: and so it had been
in that bit of French forest years ago, when the wild bright
searchlights lit up its plague-spotted glades.  Civilians talk
glibly of courage and cowardice who have never smelt the odour
of corruption. . . .

"What's your motive?  Some misbegotten sense of duty?"

"Partly," said Val, turning from the window.  How like his eyes
were to his young sister's!  The impression was unwelcome, and
Lawrence flung it off.  "I ought never to have given way to you.
I ought to have faced Wynn-West and let him deal with me as he
thought fit.  After all, I was of no standing in the regiment.
A boy of nineteen--what on earth would it have signified?  I
was so very young."

Nineteen! yes, one called a lad young at nineteen even in those
pitiless days.  Under normal conditions he would have had two or
three years' more training before he was required to shoulder the
responsibilities and develop the braced muscles of manhood.

"Anyhow it's all over now--"

"No, you forget." A wave of colour swept over Val's face but his
voice was steady.  "Through me the regiment holds a distinction
it hasn't earned, and the distinction is in hands that don't
deserve to hold it. That isn't consonant with the traditions of
the service."

"Oh, when it comes to the honour of the Army--!" Lawrence jeered
at him.  "There speaks the soldier born and bred.  But I was only
a 'temporary.' Give me a personal reason."

"Well, I can do that too!  I hate sailing under false colours.
The good folk of Chilmark; my own people; Bernard, Laura . . . ."
Lawrence's eyes began to sparkle: when a man's voice deepens over
a woman's name--! "Oh, I dare say nothing will ever come of it,"
Val resumed after a moment: "my father may live another thirty
years, and by that time I should be too old to stand in a white
sheet.  Or perhaps I shall only tell one or two people--"

"Mrs. Clowes?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"You would like to tell my cousin and his wife?"

"I should like to feel myself a free agent, which I'm not now,
because I'm under parole to you."

"And so you will remain," said Lawrence coldly.

"You mean that?"

"Thoroughly.  I've no wish to distress you, Val, but I'm no more
convinced now than I was ten years ago that you can be trusted to
judge for yourself.  You were an impulsive boy then with remarkably
little self-control: you're--forgive my saying so--an impulsive man
now, capable of doing things that in five minutes you would be
uncommonly sorry for.  How long would Bernard keep your secret?  If
I'm not much mistaken you would lose your billet and the whole county
would hear why.  The whole thing's utter rubbish.  You make too much
of your ribbon: you--I--it would never have been given if Dale's
father hadn't been a brass hat."

Stafford was ashy pale. "I know you think you're just."

"No, I don't. I'm not just, my good chap: I'm weakly, idiotically
generous.  In your heart of hearts you're grateful to me.  Now
let's drop all this.  Nothing you can say will have the slightest
effect, so you may as well not say it." He stood by Val's chair,
laughing down at him and gently gripping him by the shoulder.
"Be a man, Val! you're not nineteen now.  You've got a comfortable
job and the esteem of all who know you--take it and be thankful:
it's more than you deserve.  If you must indulge in a hair shirt,
wear it under your clothes.  It isn't necessary to embarrass other
people by undressing in public."

Thought is free: one may be at a man's mercy and in his debt and
keep one's own opinion of him, impersonal and cold.  With a faint
smile on his lips Val got up and strolled over to the piano.
"Hullo, what's all this music lying about?" he said in his
ordinary manner.  "Has Laura been playing?  Good, I'm so glad:
Bernard can hardly ever stand it.  See the first fruits of your
bracing influence!  Oh, the Polonaises . . ."  And then he in
his turn began to play, but not the melancholy fiery lyrics that
had soothed Laura's unsatisfied heart.  Val, a thorough musician,
went for sympathy to the classics.  Impulsive?  There was not
much impulse left in this quiet, reticent man, who with his old
trouble fresh on him could sit down and play a chorale of Bach or
a prelude of Mozart, subordinating his own imperious anguish to
the grave universal daylight of the elder masters.  Long since
Val had resolved that no shadow from him should fall across any
other life.  He had foresworn "that impure passion of remorse,"
and so keen an observer as Rowsley had grown up in his intimacy
without suspecting anything wrong.  Unfortunately for Val,
however, he still suffered, though he was now denied all
expression, all relief: the wounded mind bled inwardly.  It was
no wonder Val's hair was turning grey.

Lawrence, no mean judge of music, understood much--not all--of
the significance of Val's playing.  He was an imaginative man--
far more so than Val, who would have lived an ordinary life and
travelled on ordinary lines of thought but for the war, which
wrenched so many men out of their natural development.  But it
was again unfortunate for Val that the sporting instinct ran
strong in Captain Hyde.  He was irritated by Val's grave superior
dignity, and deep and unacknowledged there was working in him the
instinct of the bully, the love of cruelty, overlaid by layer on
layer of civilization, of chivalry, of decency, yet native to the
human heart and quick to reassert itself at any age: in the boy
who thrashes a smaller boy, in the young man who takes advantage
of a woman, in the fighter who hounds down surrendered men.

He settled himself in a chair close to the piano. "Val, I'm very
glad to have met you.  Having taken so much upon me," he was
smiling into Val's eyes, "I've often wondered what had become of
you.  This," he lightly touched Val's arm, "was a cruel handicap.
I had to disable you, but it need not have been permanent."

"Do you mind moving? you're in my light."

He shifted his chair by an inch or so.  "After all, what's a single
failure of nerve?  Physical causes--wet, cold, indigestion, tight
puttees--account for nine out of ten of these queer breakdowns.
At all events you've paid, Val, paid twice over: when I read your
name in the Honours List I laughed, but I was sorry for you.  The
sword-and-epaulets business would have been mild compared to that."

"Cat and mouse, is it?" said Val, resting his hands on the keys.

"What?"

"I'm not going to stand this sort of thing, Hyde, not for a
minute."

"I don't know what you mean," said Lawrence, reddening slowly to
his forehead.  But it was a lie: he was not one of those who can
overstep limits with impunity.  The streak of vulgarity again!
and worse than vulgarity: Andrew Hyde's sardonic old voice was
ringing in his ears, "Lawrence, you'll never be a gentleman."

"All right, we'll leave it at that.  Only don't do it again."
Lawrence was dumb.  "Here's Mrs. Clowes."

Val rose as Laura came in, released at length from attendance on
her husband. "I heard you playing," she said, giving him her hand
with her sweet, friendly smile. "So you've introduced yourself to
Captain Hyde?  I hope you were nice to him, for my gratitude to
him is boundless. I haven't seen Bernard looking so fit or so
bright for months and months!  Now sit down, both of you, and
we'll have cigarettes and coffee.  Ring, Val, will you--? it's
barely half past ten.

"I can only stay for one cigarette, Laura: I must get home to
bed."

"But, my dear boy, how tired you look!" exclaimed Laura.  "You do
too much--I'm sure you do too much.  He wears himself out,
Lawrence--oh! my scarf!" She was wearing a silver scarf over her
black dress, and as she moved it fluttered up and caught on the
chain round her throat. "Unfasten me, please, Val," she said,
bending her fair neck, and Val was obliged laboriously to
disentangle the silken cobweb from the spurs of her clear-set
diamonds, a process which fascinated Lawrence, whose mind was
more French than English in its permanent interest in women.
Certainly Val's office of friend of the family was not less
delicate because Laura, secure in her few years seniority,
treated him like a younger brother!  Watching, not Val, but Val's
reflection in a mirror,  Lawrence overlooked no shade of
constraint, no effort that Val made to avoid touching with his
finger-tips the satin allure of Laura's exquisite skin.  "Poor
miserable Val!" Suspicion was crystallizing into certainty.  "Or
is it poor Bernard?   No, I swear she doesn't know.  Does he know
himself?"

A servant had brought in coffee, and Lawrence in his quality of
cousin poured out two cups and carried them over to Laura and to
Val.  "Well, I'm damned!" murmured Lawrence as Val refastened the
clasp of the chain.  "Picturesque, all this.--  Here, Val, here's
your coffee."

"But do you know each other so well as that?" exclaimed Laura,
arching her wren's-feather eyebrows.

"I was an infant subaltern when Hyde knew me," said Val laughing,
"and he was a howling swell of a captain.  Do you remember that
night you all dined with us, sir, when we were in billets?  We
stood you champagne--"

"Purchased locally.  I remember the champagne."

"Dine with us tomorrow night," said Laura. "Do! and bring
Isabel." Lawrence gave an imperceptible start: for the last hour
he had forgotten Isabel's existence except when her eyes had
looked at him out of her brother's face.  "The child will enjoy
it, I never knew any one so easily pleased; and you and Lawrence
and Bernard can rag one another to your heart's content.  Yes,
you will, I know you will, Army men always do when they get
together; and you're all boys, even Bernard, even you with your
grey hair, my dear Val; as for Lawrence, he's only giving himself
airs."

"Yes, do bring your sister," said Lawrence. "She is the most
charming young girl I've met for years, if a man of my mature age
may say so.  She is so natural, a rare thing nowadays: the modern
jeune fille is a sophisticated product."

"Bravo, Lawrence!" cried Mrs. Clowes, clapping her hands.  "Now,
Val, didn't I tell you Isabel was going to be very, very pretty?
That's settled, then, you'll both come: and, to please me," she
looked not much older than Isabel as she took hold of the lapel
of Val's coat, "will you wear your ribbon?  I know you hate
wearing it in civilian kit!  But I do so love to see you in it:
and it's not as if there would be any one here but ourselves."

Lawrence swung round on his heel and walked away.  One may enjoy
the pleasures of the chase and yet draw the line at watching an
application of the rack, and it sickened him to remember that his
own hand had given a turn to the screw.  It had needed that brief
colloquy to let him see what Stafford's life was like at Wanhope,
and in what slow nerve-by-nerve laceration amends were being
made.  He admired the gallantry of Stafford's reply.

"My dear Laura, I would tie myself up in ribbon from head to foot
if it would give you pleasure.  I'll wear it if you like, though
my superior officer will certainly rag me if I do."

"No, I shan't," said Lawrence shortly.




CHAPTER VIII


"And now tell me,"  murmured Mrs. Clowes in the mischievously
caressing tone that she kept for Isabel, "did mamma's little girl
enjoy her party?"

"Rather!" said Isabel--with a great sigh, the satisfied sigh of
a dog curling up after a meal. "They were lovely strawberries.
And what do you call that French thing?  Oh, that's what a
vol-au-vent is, is it?  I wish I knew how to make it, but probably
it's one of those recipes that begin 'Take twelve eggs and a quart of
cream.' I wish nice things to eat weren't so dear, Jimmy would love
it.  Captain Hyde took two helps--did you see?--big ones!  If he
always eats as much as he did tonight he'll be fat before he's fifty,
which will be a pity.  He ate three times what Val did."

"Is that what you were thinking of all the time?  I noticed you
didn't say very much."

"Well, I was between Captain Hyde and Major Clowes, and they
neither of them think I'm grown up," explained Isabel.  "They
talked to each other over the top of me.  Oh no, not rudely,
Major Clowes was as nice as he could be" (Isabel salved her
conscience by reflecting that this was verbally true since Major
Clowes could never he nice), "and Captain Hyde asked me if I was
fond of dolls--"

"My dear Isabel!"

"Or words to that effect.  Oh! it's perfectly fair, I'm not grown
up, or only by fits and starts.  Some of me is a weary forty-five
but the rest is still in pigtails.  It's curious, isn't it?
considering that I'm nearly twenty.  Let's go through the wood,
my stockings are coming down."  Out of sight of the house in a
clearing of the loosely planted alder-coppice by the bridge, she
pulled them up, slowly and candidly: white cotton stockings
supported by garters of black elastic.  "After all," she
continued, "I'm housekeeper, and in common politeness we shall
have to dine you back, so I really did want to see what sort of
things Captain Hyde likes.  But it's no use, he won't like
anything we give him.  Not though we strain our resources to the
uttermost. Laura! would Mrs. Fryar give me the receipt for that
vol-au-vent? I don't suppose we could run to it, but I should
love to try."

"Mrs.  Fryar would be flattered," said Laura, finding a chair in
the forked stem of a wild apple-tree,  while Isabel sat plump
down on the net of moss-fronds and fine ivy and grey wood-violets
at her feet.  "But, my darling, you're not to worry your small
head over vol-au-vents!  Lawrence will like one of your own roast
chickens just as well, or any simple thing--"

"Oh no, Lawrence won't!" Isabel gave a little laugh.  "Excuse my
contradicting you, but Lawrence isn't a bit fond of simple
things.  That's why he doesn't like me, because I'm simple,
simple as a daisy.  I don't mind--much," she added truthfully.
"I can survive his most extended want of interest.  After all
what can you expect if you go out to dinner in the same nun's
veiling frock you wore when you were confirmed, with the tucks
let down and the collar taken out?  O! Laura,  I wish someone
would give me twenty pounds on condition that I spent it all on
dress!  I'd buy--I'd buy--oh,--silk stockings, and long
gloves, and French cambric underclothes, and chiffon nightgowns
like those Yvonne wears (but they aren't decent: still that
doesn't matter so long as you're not married, and they are so
pretty)!  And a homespun tailor-made suit with a seam down the
back and open tails: and--and--one of those real Panamas that
you can pull through a wedding ring: and--oh! dear, I am greedy!
It must be because I never have any clothes at all that I'm
always wanting some. I ache all over when I look at catalogues.
Isn't it silly?"

If so it was a form of silliness with which Mrs. Clowes was in
full sympathy.  In her world, to be young and pretty gave a woman
a claim on Fate to provide her with pretty dresses and the
admiration of men.  As for Yvonne, till she married Jack Bendish
she had never been out of debt in her life.  "No, it's the most
natural thing on earth," said Laura.  "How I wish--!"

"No, no," said Isabel hastily.  "It's very, very sweet of you,
but even Jimmy wouldn't like it: and as for Val I don't know what
he'd say!  Poor old Val, he wants some new evening clothes
himself, and it's worse for him than for me because men do so
hate to look shabby and out at elbows.  He's worn that suit for
ten years.  My one consolation is that Captain Hyde couldn't wear
a suit he wore ten years ago.  It would burst."

"Isabel!  really!  you ridiculous child, why have you such a
spite against poor Lawrence?  Any one would think he was a
perfect Daniel Lambert!  Do you know he's a pukka sportsman and
has shot all over the world?  Lions and tigers, and rhinoceros,
and grizzly bears, and all sorts of ferocious animals!  He's
promised me a black panther skin for my parlour and he's
persuaded Bernard to call in Dr. Verney for his neuritis, so I
won't hear another word against him!"

"Has he?  H'm. . . . No, I haven't any prejudice against him: in
fact I like him," said Isabel, smiling to herself.  "But he
reminds me of Tom Wallis at the Prince of Wales's Feathers.  Do
you remember Tom?   'Poor Tom,' Mrs. Wallis always says, 'he went
from bad to worse.  First it was a drop too much of an evening:
and then he began getting drunk mornings: and then he 'listed for
a soldier!' Not that Captain Hyde would get drunk, but he has the
same excitable temperament. . . .  Laura!"

"What is it?" said Mrs. Clowes, framing the young face between
her hands as Isabel rose up kneeling before her.  In the
quivering apple-tree shadow Isabel's eyes were very dark, and
penetrating and reflective too, as if she had just undergone one
of those transitions from childhood to womanhood which are the
mark and the charm of her variable age.  Laura was puzzled by her
judgment of Lawrence Hyde, so keen, yet so wide of the truth as
Laura saw it: "excitable" was the last thing that Laura would
have called him, and she couldn't see any likeness to Tom Wallis.
But one can't argue over a man's character with a child. "Why so
serious?"

"This evening, at dinner, weren't there some queer
undercurrents?"

"Undercurrents!" Laura drew her hands away. She looked startled
and nervous.  "What sort of undercurrents?"

"When they were chaffing Val about his ribbon. Oh, I don't know,"
said Isabel vaguely.  Laura drew a breath of relief. "I was sorry
you made him wear it.  But he'd cut his hand off to please you,
darling.  You don't really realize the way you can make Val do
anything you like."

"Nonsense," said Laura, but with an indulgent smile, which was
her way of saying that it was true but did not signify.  She was
no coquette, but she preferred to create an agreeable impression.
Always in France, where women are the focus of social interest,
there had been men who did as Laura Selincourt pleased, and the
incense which Val alone continued to burn was not ungrateful to
her altar.  "As if Val would mind about a little thing like
that."

Isabel shook her head.  "Perhaps you weren't attending.  Major
Clowes was very down on him for wearing it--chaffing him, of
course, but chaffing half in earnest: a snowball with a stone in
it.  Naturally Val wasn't going to say you made him--"

"No, but Lawrence did: or I should have cut in myself."

"Yes, after a minute, he interfered, and then Major Clowes shut
up, but it was all rather--rather queer, and I'm sure Val hated
it.  You won't make him do it again, will you?  Val's so odd.
Laura--don't tell any one--I sometimes think Val's very
unhappy."

"Val, unhappy?  You fanciful child, this is worse than Tom
Wallis! What should make Val unhappy?  He might be dull," said
Laura ruefully.  "Life at Wanhope isn't exciting!  But he's keen
on his work and very fond of the country.  Val is one of the most
contented people I know."

A shadow fell over Isabel's face, the veil that one draws down
when one has offered a confidence to hands that are not ready to
receive it.  "Then it must be all my imagination." She abandoned
the subject as rapidly as she had introduced it. "O! dear, I am
sleepy." She stretched herself and yawned, opening her mouth wide
and shutting it with a little snap like a kitten.  "I was up at
six to give Val his breakfast, and I've been running about all
day, what with the school treat next week, and Jimmy's new
night-shirts that I had to get the stuff for and cut them out,
and choir practice, and Fanny taking it into her head to make
rhubarb jam.  How can London people stay up till twelve or one
o'clock every night?  But of course they don't get up at six."

"Have a snooze in my hammock," suggested Laura. "I see Barry
coming, which means that Bernard is going off and I shall have to
run away and leave you, and probably the men won't come out for
some time.  Take forty winks, you poor child, it will freshen you
up."

"I never, never go to sleep in the daytime," said Isabel firmly.
"It's a demoralizing habit.  But I shouldn't mind tumbling into
your hammock, thank you very much." And, while Mrs. Clowes went
away with Barry, she slipped across to Laura's large comfortable
cot, swung waist-high between two alders that knelt on the river
brink.

Isabel sprawled luxuriously at full length, one arm under her
head and the other dropped over the netting: her young frame was
tired, little flying aches of fatigue were darting pins and
needles through her knees and shoulders and the base of her
spine.  The evening was very warm and the stars winked at her,
they were green diamonds that sparkled through chinks in the
alder leafage overhead: round dark leaves like coins, and
scattered in clusters, like branches of black bloom.  Near at
hand the river ran in silken blackness, but below the coppice,
where it widened into shallows, it went whispering and rippling
over a pebbly bottom on its way to the humming thunder of the
mill.  And in a fir-tree not far off a nightingale was singing,
now a string of pearls dropping bead by bead from his throat, now
rich turns and grace-notes, and now again a reiterated metallic
chink which melted into liquid fluting:

              Vogek im Tannenwald
              Pfeifet so hell:
              Pfeifet de Wald aus und ein,
         wo wird mein Schatze sein?
         Vogele im Tannenwald pfeifet so hell.

Isabel was still so young that she felt the beauty more deeply
when she could link it with some poetic association, and as she
listened to the nightingale she murmured to herself "'In some
melodious plot of beechen green with shadows numberless'--but
it isn't a beech, it's a fir-tree," and then wandering off into
another literary channel, "'How thick the bursts come crowding
through the leaves!  Eternal passion--eternal pain' . . . but I
don't believe he feels any pain at all.  It is we who feel pain.
He's not been long married, and it's lovely weather, and there's
plenty for them to eat, and they're in love . . . what a heavenly
night it is!  I wish some one were in love with me.  I wonder if
any one ever will be.

"How thrilling it would be to refuse him!  Of course I couldn't
possibly accept him--not the first: it would be too slow,
because then one couldn't have any more.  One would be like
Laura.  Poor Laura!  Now if she were in that tree"--Isabel's
ideas were becoming slightly confused--"it would be natural for
her to be melancholy--only if she were a bird she wouldn't care,
she would fly off with some one else and leave Major Clowes, and
all the other birds would come and peck him to death.  They
manage these things better in bird land."  Isabel's eyes shut but
she hurriedly opened them again.  "I'm not going to go to sleep.
It's perfectly absurd.  It can't be much after nine o'clock.  I
dare say Captain Hyde will come out before so very long . . . I
should like to talk to him again by myself.  He isn't so
interesting when other people are there. I wonder why I told
Laura he was getting fat?  He isn't: he couldn't be, to travel
all over the world and shoot black panthers.  And if he did take
two helps of vol-au-vent, you must remember, Isabel, he's a big
man--well over six feet--and requires good support.  He
certainly is not greedy or he would have tried to pick out the
oysters: all men love oysters.

"He was nice about Val's ribbon, too . . . wish I understood
about that ribbon.  Val was grateful: he said 'Thanks, Hyde'
while Major Clowes was speaking to Barry.  Laura isn't stupid,
but she never understands Val.  'Contented?' My dearest darling
Val!  If he were being roasted over a slow fire he would be
'contented' if Laura was looking on.  That's the worst of being
perfectly unselfish: people never realize that you're unselfish
at all.  Wives don't seem to hear what their husbands say.  Often
and often Major Clowes is absolutely insulting to Val, before
Laura and before me.  But Laura always looks on Val as a boy.
Perhaps if Captain Hyde hears it going on he'll interfere and
shut Major Clowes up as he did tonight.  He can manage Major
Clowes . . . which is clever of him! 'A strong, silent man'--as
a matter of fact he talks a good deal. . . . But I loved him for
sitting on Major Clowes.  I'd rather he were nice to Val than to
me.

"But he might be nice to me too. . . .

"He was, yesterday afternoon.  How he coloured up! He was
absolutely natural for the minute.  That can't often happen.
People who don't like giving themselves away are thrilling when
they do."

Another yawn came upon her.

"O! dear, I really mustn't go to sleep.  What a lulling noise you
make, you old river!  I don't think I can get up at six tomorrow.
This hammock is as comfortable as a bed.  'The young girl
reclined in a graceful attitude, her head pillowed on her slender
hand, her long dark lashes entangled and resting on her ivory
cheek.' Well, they couldn't rest anywhere else: unless they were
long enough to rest on her nose. 'Her--her breathing  was soft
and regular . . .'"  It became so.  Isabel slept.

Val would rather have owed no gratitude to a man he disliked so
much as Hyde.  When Bernard was wheeled away, an interchange of
perfunctory civilities was followed by a constrained silence,
which Val broke by rising.  "Hyde, if you'll excuse me, I'll say
five words to Bernard before Barry begins getting him to bed.
There's a right of way dispute going on that he liked me to keep
him posted up in."

"Do," said Lawrence vaguely. He brushed past Val and escaped into
the garden.

Lawrence was enjoying his stay at Wanhope, but tonight he felt
defrauded, though he knew not why.  He had had an agreeable day.
In the morning Jack Bendish had appeared on horseback and Lawrence
had ridden over with him to lunch at Wharton, a sufficiently amusing
experience, what with the crabbed high-spirited whims of Jack's
grandfather and the old-fashioned courtesy of Lord Grantchester, and
Yvonne's romantic toilette: later Laura had joined them and they had
played bowls on the famous green: in the cool of the evening he had
strolled home with Laura through the fields.  Dinner too had been
amusing in its way, the wines were excellent, the parlour maid waited
at table like a deft ghost, and he recognized in Mrs. Fryar an artist
who was thrown away alike on Bernard's devotion to roast beef and
Val's inability to remember what he ate.  Yet Lawrence was left
vaguely discontented.

Bernard's manner to Val had set his teeth on edge.  Bernard could
have meant no harm: no one had ever known the truth except
Lawrence and Val, and possibly Dale with such torn shreds of
consciousness as H. E. and barbed wire had left him: but in all
innocence Bernard had set the rack to work as deftly as Lawrence
could have done it himself.  Lawrence pitied--no, that was a
slip of the mind: he was not so weak as to pity Stafford, but
their intercourse was difficult, genant.

And Isabel Stafford too: Clowes had left her out of the
conversation as though she were a child, and though Lawrence
tried to bring her in she remained, so to say, in the nursery
most of the time, speaking when she was spoken to but without any
of her characteristic freshness and boldness.  She was the
schoolgirl that Clowes expected her to be.  Her very dress
irritated Lawrence, as if he had seen a fine painting in a tawdry
frame, or a pearl of price foiled by a spurious setting.  He had
not felt any glow at all, and was left to suppose his fancy had
played him a trick.  Disappointing! and now there was no chance
of revising his impression, for apparently she had gone away with
Laura--who should have known better than to leave Captain Hyde
to his own devices.  But probably Miss Stafford had refused to
face the men alone: it was what a little shy country girl would
do.

Isabel's arm hanging over the edge of the hammock, and pearly
white in the dark, was his first warning of her presence.  He
crossed the wood with his hunter's step and found her lapped in
dreams, the starlight that filtered between the alder branches
chequering her with a faint diaper of light and shade.  Only the
very young can afford to be, seen asleep, when the face sinks
back into its original repose, and lines and wrinkles reappear in
the loss of all that smiling charm of expression which may efface
them by day.  Laura, asleep, looked old and haggard.  But Isabel
presented a blank page, a face virginally pure, and candid, and
lineless: from the attitude of her young body one would have
thought she was constructed without bones, and from her serenity
it might have been a child who slept there in the June night, so
placidly entrusting herself to its mild embrace.  Vividly aware
that he had no right to watch her, Lawrence stood watching her,
though afraid at every breath that she would wake up: it was hard
to believe that even in her sleep she could remain insensible of
his eyes.  Here was the authentic Isabel, the girl who had
enchanted him on the moor: the incarnation of that classic beauty
by which alone his spirit was capable of being touched to fine
issues.  The alder branches quivered, their clusters of black
shadow fell like an embroidered veil over the imperfections of
her dress, but what light there was shone clear on her head and
throat, and the pearly moulding of her shoulder, based where her
sleeve was dragged down a little by the tension of her weight
upon it.  All the mystery of womanhood and all its promise of
life in bud and life not yet sown lay on this young girl asleep
in the starshine.  Lights flashed up in the house, figures were
moving between the curtains: Laura had left Bernard, soon she
would come out into the garden and call to Isabel, and Isabel
would wake and his chance be lost.  His chance?  Isabel had
rashly incurred a forfeit and would have to pay.  The frolic was
old, there was plenty of precedent for it, and not for one moment
did Lawrence dream of letting her off.  A moth, a dead leaf might
have settled on her sleeping lips and she would have been none
the wiser, and just such a moth's touch he promised himself, the
contact of a moment, but enough to intoxicate him with its
sweetness, and the first--yes, he believed it would be the
first: not from any special faith in Isabel's obduracy, but
because no one in Chilmark was enough of a connoisseur to
appreciate her.  Yes, the first, the bloom on the fruit, the
unfolding of the bud, he promised himself that: and warily he
stooped over Isabel, who slept as tranquil as though she were in
her own room under the vicarage eaves.  Lawrence held his breath.
If she were to wake?  Then?--Oh, then the middleaged friend of
the family claiming his gloves and his jest!  But Lawrence was
not feeling middle-aged.

"O! dear," said Isabel, "I've been asleep!"

She sat up rubbing her eyes.  "Laura, are you there?" But no one
was there.  Yet, though she was alone, in the solitude of the
alder shade Isabel blushed scarlet.  "What a ridiculous dream!
worse than ridiculous, What would Val say if he knew?  Really,
Isabel, you ought to be whipped!" She slipped to her feet and
peered suspiciously this way and that into the shadowy corners of
the wood.  Not a step: not the rustle of a leaf: no one.

Yet Isabel's cheeks continued to burn, till with a little
frightened laugh she buried them in her hands. "O! it was--
it was a dream--?"




CHAPTER IX


Lawrence's reflections when he went to bed that night were more
insurgent and disorderly than usual.  In his negative philosophy,
when he shut the door of his room, it was his custom to shut the
door on memory too--to empty his mind of all its contents except
the physical disposition to sleep.  He cultivated an Indian's
self-involved and deliberate vacancy.  On this his second night
at Wanhope however--Wanhope which was to bring him a good many
white nights before he was done with it--he lay long awake,
watching the stars that winked and glittered in the field of his
open window, the same stars that were perhaps shining on Isabel's
pillow. . . .

Isabel: it was on her that his thoughts ran with a tiring
persistency against which his common sense rebelled.  A kiss!
what was it after all?  A Christmas forfeit, a prank of which
even Val Stafford could have said no worse than that it was
beneath the dignity of his six and thirty years:  only too
flattering for such a little country girl, sunburnt, simple, and
occasionally tongue-tied.  The lady of the ivory frame (whom
Lawrence had fished out of her seclusion and set up on his
dressing table, to the disgust of Caroline: who was a Baptist,
and didn't care to dust a person who wore so few clothes), the
lady of the ivory frame was far handsomer than Isabel, or at
least handsome in a far more finished style.

Lawrence had the curiosity to get out of bed and carry Mrs. Cleve
to the window.  Yes, she certainly was an expensive luxury, this
smiling lady, her eyes large and liquid, her waved hair rippling
under its diamond aigrette, her rather wide, eighteenth century
shoulders dimpling down under a collar of diamonds to the half
bare swell of her breast: and for an amateur of her type she was
charming, with her tired, sophisticated glance and her fresh
mouth, like a rouged child: but it was borne in on Lawrence that
she was not for him.  He had kissed her two or three times, as
occasion served and she seemed to desire it, but he had never
lain awake afterwards, nor had his heart beaten any faster, no,
not even in the summerhouse at Bingley when she was fairly in his
arms.  He pitched the photograph into a drawer.  Frederick Cleve
was safe, for him.

Strolling out on the balcony,  Lawrence folded his arms on the
balustrade.  The night was hot: perhaps that was why he could not
sleep.  By his watch it was ten minutes past two.  The moon was
near her setting.    She lay on her back with tumbled clouds all
round her: mother & pearl clouds, quilted, and tinged with a
sheen of opal.  He wondered whether Bernard was asleep: poor
Bernard, lying alone through the dreary hours.   Perhaps it was
because Lawrence was not at all like a curate that Bernard had
already made his cousin free of certain dark corners which Val
had never been allowed to explore.  "My wife?  She's not my
wife," Clowes had said, staring up at Lawrence with his wide
black eyes.  "She's my nurse."  And he went on defining the
situation with the large coarse frankness which he permitted
himself since his accident, and which did not repel Lawrence, as
it would have repelled Val or Jack Bendish, because Lawrence
habitually used the same frankness in his own mind.  There was
some family likeness between the cousins, and it came out in
their common contempt for modern delicacy, which Bernard called
squeamishness and Lawrence damned in more literary language as
the Victorian manner.

The moon dipped lower over the trees while Lawrence took one of
his sharp turns of self-analysis.  Most men live in a haze, but
Lawrence was naturally a clear thinker, and he had neither a warm
heart nor a sentimental temperament to blind him.  Cleve was
safe: but with his Rabelaisian candour and cultivated want of
scruple Lawrence reflected that Cleve had been anything but safe
at Bingley.  Whence the change?  From Isabel Stafford!  Lawrence
shrugged his shoulders: he was accustomed to examine himself in a
dry light of curiosity, and no vice or weakness shocked him,  but
here was pure folly.

What was he doing at Wanhope?  "I'm contracting attachments," he
reflected, unbuttoning his silk jacket to feel the night air cool
on his chest, a characteristic action: wind, sunshine, a
wandering scent,  the freshness of dew, all the small sensuous
pleasures that most men neglect, Lawrence would go out of his way
to procure.   "I'm breaking my rule." Long ago he had resolved
never to let himself get fond of any one again, because in this
world of chance and change, at the mercy of a blindly striking
power, the game is not worth the candle: one suffers too much.

As for Miss Stafford, one need not be a professed stole to draw
the line at a little country girl, pious to insipidity and simple
to the brink of silliness.  Here Lawrence, not being one of those
who deny facts when they are unwelcome, caught himself up: she
was not insipid and her power over him was undeniable.  Twice
within forty-eight hours she had defeated his will, and what was
stranger was that each time he had surrendered eagerly, feeling
for the moment as though it didn't matter what he said or did
before Isabel.--It was at this point of his analysis that Lawrence
began to take fright.  "You rascal," he said to himself, "so that's
why you're off Mrs. Cleve, is it?  What is it you want--to marry the
child?  You would be sick to death of her in six weeks--and haven't
you had enough of giving hostages to Fortune?"

Hostages to fortune: that pregnant phrase frightens men who fear
nothing else in heaven or earth.  But not one of Hyde's friends
knew that he had ever given fortune a hostage.  He was not
reserved as a rule: indeed he was always willing to argue creed
and code with a frankness rare in the self-conscious English
race: he was never shy and there was little in him that was
distinctively English.  But he was too subtle and inconsistent
for the average homogeneous Englishman, and not even the comrades
of trench and tent knew much about his private life.  Lawrence
was one of those products of a high civilization which have in
them pretty strong affinities with barbarism,--but always with a
difference.  The noble savage tortures his enemy out of hate or
revenge: Lawrence, more sophisticated in brutality, was capable
of doing it by way of a psychological experiment.  The savage
takes a short cut from desire to possession:  Lawrence though his
blood ran hot curbed it from caution, because in modern life
women are a burden and a drag.

This was the trained and tempered Lawrence Hyde, a personage of
great good humour and numitigable egoism.  This was the companion
of easy morals with whom Lawrence was on familiar terms.  But on
that first white night at Wanhope Lawrence grew dimly aware of
the upheaval of deeper forces, as if his youth were stirring in
its grave.  When Laura Clowes smiled at him with her gallant
bearing: when Bernard gripped his hand in wishing him good night:
when Val in the middle of the psychological experiment pierced
him with his grave tired eyes, all sorts of feelings long dormant
and believed to be dead came to life in Lawrence: pity, and
affection, and remorse and shame.  "Hang the fellow!" Lawrence
reflected.  "He's too like his sister.  And Isabel?  She is a
child."  Whose voice was it that answered, "This is the woman I
have been waiting for all my life?"

And then, turning at bay, he came to a sufficiently cynical
conclusion.  "No nonsense!" he said to himself.  "Your trouble is
that she's twenty and you're six and thirty, which is a dangerous
age.  But you don't want to marry her, and there's no middle
course.  Fruit defendu, mon ami: hands off!  If you can't be
sensible you'll have to shift out of Wanhope and compromise on
Mrs. Cleve."

The rain held off, and after breakfast--a cheery meal at which
Bernard for the first time for many months appeared dressed and
in a good temper--Lawrence fulfilled the main duty of a guest by
going for a walk.

He came by footbridge and field path into the High Street, where
he was immediately buttonholed by the vicar.  Lawrence had a
fixed idea that all priests were hypocrites: they must be, since
as educated men they could not well believe the fables they were
paid to teach!  But it was hard to associate hypocrisy with Mr.
Stafford, whose fond ambition it was to nail Lawrence Hyde to
lecture on his Chinese travels before the Bible Class.  "Oh, nothing
religious," he explained, holding his victim firmly by the coat as
Lawrence edged away.  "Only half an hour's story-telling to put a few
new ideas into their heads--as if you were talking to a young brother
of your own.  I'm always trying to get them to emigrate, but they
need a great deal of shoving."  Lawrence said they could not emigrate
to China, and, further, that he didn't regard them as brothers.  "How
narrow you are, some of you University men!" sighed Mr. Stafford.
"What a concept of society!  But," brightening, "you're not so bad as
you're painted.  Come, come! a fifth-of-August recruit can't very
well deny that we're all brothers in arms?" Before Lawrence escaped
he was not sure that he hadn't pledged himself to an address on
"Fringes of the Empire," with special reference to the C.U.M.C.A.

It was too sunny to fish, but the trout lured him, and from the
cross-roads by the stone bridge he struck into a footpath that
led upstream into the hills, be

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