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.