"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, behind whose green spurs Chilmark before long was out of sight. Here it was lonely country. Sometimes on a headland the sun flashed white over a knot of labourers, scything the hay where no machine could go: sometimes a shepherd's cote gleamed far off above the pale wattlings of a fold: but as he wound on—and on into the Plain there was no sign of man in all the hot landscape, and no motion but the bicker of the stream over its stony bed, and the hum of insect life busy on its millions of dark and tiny vibrant wings. Not a breath of wind stirred among these grassy valleys, and Lawrence, feeling warm, had sat down by a pool under a sapling birchtree, when he heard a step on the path. It was Isabel Stafford.

He had hardly seen her again overnight, for Val had carried his young sister away before ten o'clock. He waited for her in the rare shadow of the birchtree, a tall powerful figure in a white drill suit of the tropics, his fair skin and black eyes shaded by a wide Panama hat. Isabel as she drew near was vexed to find herself blushing. She was a little shy of Captain Hyde, a little averse to meet his sparkling eyes.

"Isn't it hot?" she said, frankly wiping her face with a large handkerchief. "This is a favourite pool of mine, I often sit here when I come this way. I never saw such beautiful dragonflies, did you? They must be nearly as big as hummingbirds."

Over the brown mirror of the pool a troop of great dragonflies were ceaselessly darting to and fro, their metallic wings making a faint whirr as they looped in blinding mazes through the air that glowed blue with their splendour. "Very beautiful," said Lawrence.

"Are you out for a walk? I'm on my way to Wancote." Here panic fell on Isabel, the panic that lies in wait for young girls: if he were to think she thought he ought to offer to escort her! "I'm late, I must go on now. Good-bye!"

Lawrence stood looking down at her, impassive, almost sombre, but for the hot glow in his eyes. His caution had gone overboard. "Mayn't I come too?"

"Oh. . . ."

"Do let me."

"If you—if you like."

The valley narrowed as it receded, the upland air began to sparkle with a myriad prismatic needles that glittered from the wings of flies and beetles, and from dewdrops on patches of turf still as grey as hoarfrost in the shadow on the edge of a wood, and from wayside hollies whose leaf-points were all starred in silver. The blue bow overhead was stainless, not a cloud in it nor a mist: azure, azure, and unfathomable, like the heart of man, or the justice of God.—Isabel was not shy now but alert and radiant, as if she had caught a sparkle from the air: and expansive, as women are when they are sure of pleasing. "'For the jaded man of the world at her side, the young girl's rustic freshness was her chief charm. She was so different from the beautiful but heartless mondaines he had known in Town. No diamonds glittered round her slender throat, and her hands, though small and well-shaped, were tanned by the summer sun. But for the jaded-man-of-the-world, weary of sparkling epigram or caustic repartee, her simple chatter held a fascination of its own.' I don't believe," reflected Isabel, coming down mentally to plain prose, "he'd mind if I talked to him about the dinner or last week's washing bill."

She did not in fact enter on any such intimate topic, but conversed sedately about parish politics and the beauties of the Plain. "This is a very lonely part," she said, "there are scarcely any houses. I'm taking the magazine to one of Major Clowes' shepherds. It's rather interesting going there. He's mad."

"Mad!"

"As a March hare. He's perfectly harmless of course, and an excellent shepherd. In lambing time he looks after the ewes like a mother, Val says his flock hardly ever lose a lamb. But he's a thrilling person to district-visit. Last time I went he had the Prince of Wales staying with him."

"Why on earth don't they put him in an asylum?"

"Do you know much about country villages?" Isabel enquired. "I thought not. They never put any one in an asylum till after he's got into trouble, and not always then if he doesn't want to go: just as they never build a bridge over a level crossing till one or two people have been killed. We had a woman in Chilmark that was much madder than poor dear Ben is. She took a knife out of her drawer once when I was there and told me she was going to cut her throat with it. She made me feel the edge to see how sharp it was. At last she cut the children's throats instead of her own, and then they put her away, but none of them died and she's out again now. She's supposed to be cured. You see a County asylum doesn't keep people longer than it must because the money comes out of the rates."

"Do you mean to say," Lawrence fastened on the point that struck him most forcibly, "that your father lets you go to such places by yourself?"

"Oh yes: why not? He would think it showed want of faith to prevent me. He's very sensible about things like that," said Isabel without affectation. "There are always typhoid and diphtheria about in the autumn, but Jimmy never fusses. It wouldn't be much use if he did, with him and Val always in and out of infected houses."

"Pure fatalism—" said Lawrence, hitting with his stick at the flowers by their path. "Your brother ought to put his foot down—" Isabel seized his arm.

"Take care!— There was a bee in it. You really are most careless Captain Hyde! I shan't take you for any more walks if you do that. I dare say it was one of my own bees, and he had the very narrowest escape! And Val wouldn't dream of interfering. Ben and I are the best of friends. Besides, it's Mrs. Janaway I really go to see, poor dear, she don't ever hear a bit o' news from week's end to week's end. Wouldn't you be glad to see me," her eyes were destitute of challenge but not of humour, "if you lived three miles deep in the Plain, alone with your husband and the Prince of Wales?"

"I should be delighted to see you at any time."

Isabel, not knowing what to do with this speech, let it alone. "And the dog: I mustn't forget the dog. They have a thoroughbred Great Dane. Mr. Bendish gave Ben the puppy because it was the worst of the litter and they thought it would die: but it didn't die—no animal does that Ben gets hold of—and he's too fond of it now to part with it, though a dog fancier from Amesbury has offered him practically his own price for it."

"I should like to see the Dane."

"Well, you will, if you come with me. There's the cottage."

They had turned a bend and the head of the dale lay before them, a mere dimpling depression between breasts of chalky grass. Set close by the way on a cross-track, which forded the brook by stepping stones and went on over the downs to Amesbury, stood a small, square, tumbledown cottage, its door opening on primeval turf, though behind it a plot of garden enclosed in a quickset hedge provided Mrs. Janaway with cabbages and gooseberries and sour apples and room to hang out the clothes.

"Ben won't be in, but Billy will be looking after Clara. Billy is no good with the sheep, but he's death on tramps. In fact if I weren't here it wouldn't be too safe for you to go to the door. A Dane can pull any man down: I've heard even Jack Bendish say he wouldn't care to tackle him—"

Even Jack Bendish! Lawrence smiled. He felt the prick of Isabel's blade, it amused him, automatically he reacted to it, she made him want to fight the Dane first and Jack Bendish afterwards—but he retained just too much of the ascendancy of his six and thirty years to gratify her by self-betrayal. "You're a very brave young lady," he said cheerfully, "but if I were Val—"

He stopped short. From the cottage window, now not twenty yards off, there had come a burst of the most appalling screams he had ever heard in his life, the mechanical screaming of mortal agony. Isabel went as white as chalk and even Hyde felt the blood turn cold at his heart. Next moment the door was torn open and out of it came a big red-bearded man, dressed in a brown tweed jacket and velveteen trousers tied at the knees, and prancing high in a solemn jig. In one hand he held up an iron stake and in the other a rag of red and black carpet . . . the body of a woman in a black dress, her arms and legs hanging down, her face a scarlet mask that had ceased to scream.

"Keep back, Isabel," said Lawrence: then, running across the turf, "Drop that, Janaway! drop her!" in the hard authoritative voice of the barrack square. With the fitful docility of the mad, Janaway obeyed, and directly he did so Lawrence checked and stood on the defensive, taking a moment to collect his wits—he had need of them: he had to make his head guard his hands. He was a tall powerful man, but so was the shepherd: to offset Hyde's science, Janaway was mad and would be stopped by no punishment short of a knock-out blow: and Lawrence carried only an ordinary walking-stick, while Janaway had hold of an upright from a bit of iron railing, five feet long and barbed like a spear.

"If he whacks me over the head with that or jabs it into my stomach, I'm done," Lawrence thought, and pat to the moment Janaway, his mouth open and his teeth bare, rushed on him and struck at his eyes. Lawrence parried and sprang aside: but his arm was jarred to the elbow. "That was a close call. Ha! my chance now . . ." Like a flash, as Janaway turned, Lawrence ran in to meet him body to body, seized him by the lapels of his coat, pinned down his arms, set one foot against his thigh, and with no great exertion of strength, by the Samurai's trick of falling with one's enemy, heaved him up and shot him clean over his own shoulder: then, as they dropped together, struck with his wrist a paralysing blow at the base of the spine. Janaway's yell of fury was choked into a rattling groan.

Lawrence was up in a twinkling, but the shepherd lay where he had fallen, and Lawrence let him lie: he knew that, so handled, the victim could be counted out of action, perhaps for good and all. He stood erect, breathing deep. Ben could wait, but what of Mrs. Ben? He was shocked to find Isabel already at her side on the reddened turf.

Mechanically Lawrence picked up his stick before he went to join her. Clara was huddled up over a pool of blood, her head between her knees: not a pleasant sight for a young girl. But Isabel, though white and trembling, was collected. "I can't feel her heart, I—I'm afraid—"

She broke off. Her glance had travelled beyond Lawrence and her features were stiffening into a mask of fear. "Oh, the dog, the dog!" she pointed past him. "Billy, Billy, down, sir!"

From some eyrie on the hillside the Dane had watched without emotion the legitimate spectacle of his master beating his mistress: in the war of the sexes, a dog is ever on the man's side. But when the tables were turned Billy went to the rescue. He was coming round the corner of the cottage when Isabel caught sight of him, travelling in great bounds at the pace of a wolf, but silent. Lawrence had but just time to swing Isabel behind him before the Dane leapt for his throat. Lawrence struck him over the head, but the blow glanced: so sudden, so thundering came the impact that Lawrence all but went down under it: and once down. . . .

The great jaws snapped one inch from his cheek, and before the Dane could recover Lawrence had seized him by the throat and fought him off. Then Lawrence set his back against the cottage wall and felt safer. A second blow got home, and spoilt Billy's beauty for ever: it laid open his left eye and the left side of his jaw. Undaunted, the Dane gave himself an angry shake, which spattered Lawrence with blood, and gathered his haunches for a second spring. But by now Lawrence had clubbed his stick and was beating him about the head with its heavy knobbed handle. Swift as the dog was, the man was swifter: they fought eye to eye, the man forestalling every motion of the dog's whipcord frame: Lawrence's blood was up, he would have liked to fight it out bare-handed. They would not have been ill-matched, for when the Dane reared Lawrence overtopped him only by an inch or so, and the weight of the steelclad paws on his breast tore open his clothes and pinned him to the wall. But Lawrence thrashed him off his feet whenever he tried to rise, till at length the lean muzzle sank with a low baffled moan.

Even then there was such fell strength in him that Lawrence dared not spare him, and blow rained on blow.—"Don't kill him," said Isabel. "Put this over his head."

Lawrence took the length of serge she gave him and with characteristic indifference to danger stooped over the dog, whose spirit he admired, and tried to swathe his head in its heavy folds. But, torn, blinded, baffled, the Dane was undefeated. He wrenched his jaws out of their mufflings and rolled his head from side to side, snapping right and left. "Oh Billy," cried Isabel, "you know me, lie down, dear old man!" A pure-bred dog when sight and hearing are gone will recognize a familiar scent. In an agony of pity Isabel flung her arm over the heaving shoulders—

"Don't!" Lawrence dragged her off, but too late: the Dane's teeth had snapped on her wrist. The next moment he was lying on his side with his brains beaten out. Lawrence was willing to spare his own enemy but not Isabel's.

"Oh," said Isabel, shivering and moaning, "oh, my poor old Billy!"

"Damn your poor old Billy," said Lawrence: "let me look at your arm."

He carried her indoors, leaving Janaway and his wife and the Dane lying scattered on the sunlit turf. He did not care one straw whether they lived or died. In the little front parlour, neat and fresh with its window full of white muslin and red geraniums, he laid Isabel on a sofa and rolled up her sleeve: the flesh was not much torn but the Dane's fangs had sunk in deep and clean. "How far are we from a doctor?"

"Four miles. Why? Billy wasn't mad. I shall be all right directly. May I have some water to drink?"

"Curse these country hamlets," said Lawrence. He could not carry her four miles, nor was she fit to walk so far: but to fetch help would mean an hour or so's delay. He went into the kitchen to filla tumbler from the pump, and found an iron wash-bowl in Clara Janaway's neat sink, and a kettle boiling on the hob beside a saucepan of potatoes that she had been cooking for dinner. Isabel sat up and took the glass from his hand.

"I'm so sorry," she murmured, raising her beautiful dark eyes in a diffident apology. "It was all my own fault." Lawrence slipped a cushion under her head and drew her gently down. "Oh, thank you! But please don't trouble about me. I do feel rather queer." Lawrence thought it probable. He had been bitten by a dog himself and knew how horribly such a wound smarts. "It was all so—so very dreadful. But I shall be all right directly.. Do go back to the others: I'm afraid poor Clara—oh! oh, Captain Hyde! What are you doing?"

"Set your teeth and shut your eyes," said Lawrence "it won't take long. Your beloved Billy wasn't a nice animal to be bitten by. No, he wasn't mad, but his teeth weren't very clean, and we don't want blood poisoning to set up. Steady now." He pressed his lips to her arm.

Isabel's hand lay lax in his grasp while he methodically sucked the wound and rinsed his mouth from her tumbler. He hurt her, but she had been bred to accept pain philosophically. "Is it done?" she asked meekly when he released her. "Not any more?"

"No, that's enough. Now for a drop of warm water." He bathed the wound thoroughly and in default of a better dressing bound it up with his own handkerchief. "I wish I had some brandy to give you, but there isn't a drop in the place. Your estimable friend appears to have been a teetotaller. I don't doubt he was a pattern of all the virtues.— But for that matter I couldn't give the child publichouse stuff.— Now, my little friend, if you'll lie quiet for five minutes, I'll see what's going on outside."

"Please may I have my skirt?"

"Your what?"

"My serge skirt."

It had not struck Lawrence till then that she was dressed in a white muslin blouse and a pink and blue striped petticoat. "Do you mean to say that was your skirt you gave me to tie up the dog's head in?"

"I hadn't anything else," said Isabel still more apologetically, and blushing—she was feeling very guilty, very much ashamed of the trouble she had given: "and you don't know how fond Ben was of Billy!"

"Oh, damn Billy!" said Lawrence for the second time.

He went out into the summer sunshine. The dog, the fallen man, the fallen woman, not one of them had stirred a hair. All was peaceful and clear in every note of black and white and scarlet on the turf plat where they lay as if on a stage, in their green setting of dimpled hillside and beech grove and marsh. There was a sickly smell in the hot bright air which carried Lawrence back to the trenches.

He went to examine the human wreckage. No need to examine Billy —his record for good or ill was manifestly closed: and Lawrence had a sickening suspicion that Mrs. Janaway too had finished with a world which perhaps had not offered her much inducement to remain in it. He lifted her up and laid her down again in a decent posture, straightening her limbs and sweeping back her clotted grey hair: no, no need to feel for the pulse in that faded breast from which her husband had partly torn away the neatly darned stuff bodice, so modest with its white tucker and silver Mizpah brooch. Lawrence composed its disorder with a reverent hand, spreading his own coat over her face.

He went on to Ben, and was frankly disappointed to find that Ben was not dead—far from it: he gave a deep groan when Lawrence rolled him over: but it was a case of broken arm and collarbone, if not of spinal injury as well. Lawrence found a length of line in the yard—Clara's clothes-line, in fact—and knotted it into a triple cord, for, though no sane man could have got far in such a state, it was on the cards that Janaway in his madness might scramble up and wander away on the downs. So Lawrence lashed him hand and foot, and Ben blinked and grinned at the sun and slavered over his beard.

It was while thus employed that Lawrence began to wonder what would have happened if Isabel had come to Wancote alone. She might have run away. But would she, while Ben was engaged in carpet-beating? Not she! Lawrence was not a fanciful man: but the red and grey remains of Clara Janaway would have set the visualizing faculty to work in the mind of a ploughboy. After tying the last of a dozen knots, reef knots and none too loose, he went to the back of the cottage where Isabel could not see him and was swiftly and violently sick.

After that he felt better. There was a pump in the yard, and he rinsed his head and hands under it, and washed off as best he could the stains of the fight, and re-knotted his scarf and shook himself down into his disordered clothes before going back to Isabel. And then it was that Isabel received of him a fresh impression as though she had never known him before, one of those vivid second impressions that efface earlier memories.

Val had always held paternal rank, Captain Hyde had been introduced as Val's late superior officer, and so Isabel had accepted him as Val's contemporary, of the generation before her own. But framed in the sunlit doorway, a very tall handsome man in undress, his coat thrown off, his trousers belted on his lean flanks, his wet shirt modelling itself over his powerful throat and shoulders and sticking to his ribs, Hyde might have been only six or seven and twenty: and certainly his manner was not middle-aged! Val's language was refined enough for a curate, and even Rowsley in his young sister's presence never went beyond a sarcenet oath; but Hyde's frank fury was piquant to Isabel's not very decorous taste. When he came in, her pain and faintness began to diminish as if a stream of warm fresh life were flowing into her veins.

"Are you better, Miss Isabel?"

"Ever so much better, thank you. Is—is Clara—?"

Cool, grave, and tranquil, Lawrence took her hand. "Clara is dead." He felt her trembling, and found a form of consolation which would have been slow to occur to his unprompted fancy. "Better so, isn't it? She wouldn't have been very happy after her husband's trying to kill her."

"No, she wouldn't want them to put him in an asylum," Isabel agreed, but in a subdued voice. "Did you forget my skirt?"

"No, but it was rather in a mess with the unfortunate Billy, and I'm afraid you'll have to do without it. I'm going to take you home now. You can walk, can't you, with my help? I'd like to carry you a few steps, till we're out of sight of the cottage. Put your arm round my neck." Isabel hesitated. She had been frightened out of her life and still felt cruelly shaken, but her quick sense of the ridiculous protested against this deference paid to her when she wasn't really hurt and it was all her own fault. What would Val have said? But apparently Captain Hyde was less exacting than Val. "Ah! let me: it is an ugly little scene outside and I don't want you to be haunted by it."

She resigned herself. She had not yet begun to feel shy of Lawrence, she was a child still, a child with the instincts of a woman, but those instincts all asleep. They quickened in her when she felt the glow of his life so near her own, but there was a touch of Miranda in Isabel, and no cautionary withdrawal followed.

And Lawrence? The trustfulness of a noble nature begets what it assumes. One need not ask what would have become of Miranda if she had given her troth to an unworthy Ferdinand, because the Mirandas of this world are rarely deceived. Hyde was but a battered Ferdinand. He was a man of strong and rather coarse fibre who had indifferently indulged tastes that he saw no reason to restrain. But he was changing: when he carried Isabel across the sunlit grass plot, her beautiful grave childish head lying warm on his shoulder, he had travelled far from the Hyde of the summer house at Bingley.

"My word!" said Yvonne Bendish, startled out of her drawl. "Is it you, Isabel?" She reined in and sat gazing with all her eyes at the couple coming down the field path to Chilmark Bridge. "Have you had an accident? What's happened?"

"Excuse my hat," said Lawrence with rather more than his habitual calm. "How lucky to have met you. There has been a shocking business up at Wancote. Perhaps you would take Miss Stafford home? She should be got to bed, I think."

Mrs. Jack Bendish was not soon ruffled, nor for long. "Lift her in," she said. "Sorry I can't make room for you too, Captain Hyde, you are as white as a ghost. Very upsetting, isn't it? but don't worry, girls of her age turn faint rather easily. Her arm hurt? . . ." She pointed down the road with her whip. "Dr. Verney lives at The Laburnus, on the right, beyond the publichouse. If you would be so kind as to send him up to the vicarage?"

She whipped up her black ponies and was gone. Lawrence was grateful to her for asking no questions, but he would rather have taken Isabel direct to Val. Romance in bud requires a delicate hand. Now Mrs. Jack Bendish had all the bourgeois virtues except modesty and discretion.



CHAPTER X

The Wancote affair made a nine days' wonder in the Plain. Indeed it even got into the London papers, under such titles as "A Domestic Tragedy" or "Duel with a Dog": and, while the Morning Post added a thumbnail sketch of Captain Hyde's distinguished career, the Spectator took Ben as the text of a "middle" on "The Abuse of Asylum Administration in Rural Districts."

Lawrence himself, when he had despatched Hubert Verney to the vicarage, would have liked to cut his responsibility. But it could not be done: first there was the village policeman to run to earth and information to be laid before him, and then, since Brown's first flustered impulse was to arrest all concerned from Lawrence to Clara Janaway, Lawrence had to walk down with him to Wharton to interview Jack Bendish, as both the nearest magistrate and the nearest sensible man. But after pouring his tale into Jack's sympathetic ear he felt entitled to wash his hands of the affair. Instead of going back to Wanhope with the relief party he got Bendish to drop him at the field path to Wanhope: and he slipped up to his room by a garden door, bathed, changed, and came down to lunch without trace of discomposure. Gaston, curtly ordered to take his master's clothes away and burn them, was eaten by curiosity, but in vain.

Even before his cousin, Lawrence did not own to his adventure till the servants had left the room. If it could have been kept dark he would not have owned to it at all. He did so only because it must soon be common property and he did not care to be taxed with affectation.

When, bit by bits his story came out across the liqueur glasses and the early strawberries, Major Clowes laid his head back and roared with laughter. Lawrence was annoyed: he had not found it amusing and he felt that his cousin had a macabre and uncomfortable sense of humour. But Bernard, wiping the tears from his eyes, developed unabashed his idea of a good joke. "Hark to him! Now isn't that Lawrence all over? What! can't you run down for twenty-four hours to a hamlet the size of Chilmark but you must bring your faics divers in your pocket?"

"It isn't my fault if you have dangerous lunatics at large," said Lawrence, helping himself daintily to cream. "If this is a specimen of the way things go on in country districts, thank you, give me a London slum. The brute was as mad as a hatter. He ought to have been locked up years ago. I can't conceive what Stafford was about to keep him on the estate."

"All very fine," Bernard chuckled, "but I'd lay any odds Ben didn't go for Mrs. Ben till he saw you coming."

"Adventures are to the adventurous," Laura mildly translated the bitter jest. Her mission in life was to smooth down Bernard's rough edges. "But that is too ugly, Berns. You oughtn't to say such a thing even in fun. It was no fun for Lawrence."

"I don't object to an occasional scrap," said Lawrence. "But this one was overdone." He shivered suddenly from head to foot.

"Hallo, old man, I didn't know you had a nerve in your body!" said Bernard staring at him.

Lawrence went on with his strawberries in an ungenial silence. He was irritated by his momentary self betrayal. If he had cared to explain it he would have had to confess that though personally indifferent to adventures he disliked to have women mixed up in them. He was glad when Laura with her intuitive tact changed the conversation, not too abruptly.

"All modern men have nerves. I should think Lawrence had as few as any, but it must have been a frightful scene. I must run up after lunch and see Isabel. Poor child! But she's wonderfully brave. All the Staffords were brought up to be stoical: if they knocked themselves about as children they were never allowed to cry. Mr. Stafford is a fanatic on the point of personal courage. Val told me once that the only sins for which his father ever cuffed him were telling fibs and running away."

"Did he get cuffed often?" Lawrence enquired.

"Shouldn't wonder," said Bernard. "Val's one of your nervy men."

"Not after he was ten years old," said Laura smiling. "But as a little boy he was always in trouble. Not the wisest treatment, was it? for a delicate, sensitive child."

"Miss Isabel is not nervous," said Lawrence. "She is as cool a young lady as I have ever seen. I believe she still owes me a grudge for hitting Billy so hard." He dipped his fingers delicately into his finger bowl. "No, no more, thanks. Did I tell you that the brute of a Dane bit her?"

"Bit Isabel!"

"Made his teeth pretty nearly meet in her forearm. She was trying to soothe the dear dog. Mr. Stafford's theories may be ethically beautiful, but I object to their being carried to extremes. Frankly, I should describe your young friend as idiotically rash," said Lawrence with a wintry smile. "I couldn't prevent her doing it because I hadn't the remotest notion she was going to do it. The Dane was practically mad with rage. I could have cuffed her myself with pleasure. It was a wild thing to do and not at all agreeable for me."

"But, my dear Lawrence, that is one way of looking at it!" Laura protested, amused by his cool egoism, though she took it with the necessary grain of salt. "Bitten by that horrible dog? My poor Isabel! she loves dogs—I don't suppose she stopped to consider her own feelings or yours."

"She ought to have had more sense."

"Hear, hear!" said Bernard. "Half the trouble in the world comes from women shoving in where they're not wanted. It's a pleasure to talk to you, Lawrence, after lying here to be slobbered over by a pack of old women. I always exclude you, my dear," he nodded to Laura, "but the parson twaddles on till he makes me sick, and Val's not much better. What's a woman want with courage? Teach her to buy decent clothes and put 'em on properly, and she's learning something useful. I'll guarantee Isabel only got in the way. But you, Lawrence," he measured his cousin with an admiring eye, much as a Roman connoisseur might have run over the points of a favourite gladiator, "I should have liked to see you tackle the Dane. You're a big chap—deeper in the chest than I ever was, and longer in the reach. What's your chest measurement?— Yes, you look it. And nothing in your hand but a stick? By Jove, it must have been worth watching! Hey, Laura?"

"Bernard, you are embarrassing! You will make even Lawrence shy. But, yes," Laura laid her hand on Hyde's arm: "I should have liked to watch you fight the Dane."

How long was it since any one had spoken to Lawrence in that warm tone of affection? Not since his father died. From time to time Mrs. Cleve or other ladies had flattered his senses or his vanity, but none of them had ever looked at him with Laura's kind admiring eyes. Perhaps after all there was something to be said for family life! Tragic wreck as Clowes was, he would have been far more to be pitied but for his wife: their marriage, crippled and sterilized, was yet—as Lawrence saw it—a beautiful relation. Suppose he stood in that relation to Isabel? Sitting at table in the cool panelled diningroom, his careless pose stiffening under Laura's touch, Lawrence for the first time began to wonder whether he would not gain more in happiness than he would lose in freedom if he were to make the child his wife.

"To make the child his wife." He was not really more of an egoist than the average man, but he did assume that if he wanted her he could win her. His mistress was very young: it was her rose of youth and her unquelled spirit that charmed him even more than her beauty: and she had not sixpence to her name, while he was a rich man. He did not, as Bernard would have done, go on to plume himself on his magnanimity, or infer that Isabel's gratitude would give him a claim on her fealty over and beyond the Pauline duty of wives. In the immediate personal relation Lawrence was visited by a saving humility. But on the main issue he took, or thought he took, a practical view. A man in love cannot soberly analyse his own psychological state, and Lawrence did not know that he had fallen in love with Isabel at first sight or that the germ of matrimonial intentions had lain all along in his mind. Here and now he believed that he first thought of marrying her.

Then he would have to stay on at Wanhope. And court Isabel under the eyes of all Chilmark? Under Bernard's eyes at all events; they were already watching him. Lawrence was irritated: whatever happened, he was not going to be watched by his cousin and chaffed and argued over and betted on. In most points indifferently frank, Lawrence was silent as the grave where sex came into play.

"Thank you." He touched with his lips the hand that Laura had innocently laid on his wrist. "It can't really be fourteen years, Laura, since you were staying at Farringay."

"Flatterer!" said Laura, smiling but startled, and rising from her chair. "This to an old married woman!"

"Ah! when I remember that I knew you before this fellow did—!"

"Here, I say," came Bernard's voice across the table, riotously amused, "none o' that! none o' that!"

"Penalty for having a charming wife," laughed Lawrence, in his preoccupation blind and deaf to danger signals. He rose to open the door for Laura. "By the by, if you go to the vicarage this afternoon, I'll stroll up with you, if I may. I suppose I owe the young lady that much civility!"

"I can't: I'm busy," said Laura hastily. "That is, I don't know what time I shall get away. Go by yourself, don't wait for me."

"Rubbish," said Bernard. "Much pleasanter for both of you to have the walk together. Lawrence doesn't want to go alone, do you?" ("Rather not," said Lawrence heartily.) "And I don't want you here, my love, if that's the trouble, I can't have you tied to the leg of my sofa."

Later, when Lawrence had gone out on the lawn to smoke, Bernard recalled Laura. She came to him. He took hold of her wrist and lay smiling up at her. "Nice relationship, isn't it, cousins-in-law? So free and easy. You—. I watched you pawing him about. So affectionate. He felt it too. Did you see the start he gave? He twigged fast enough. Think you can play that game under my nose, do you? So you can. I don't care what you do. Take yourself off now and take him with you."

"Don't pinch my wrist below the cuff, Bernard," said his wife. "I can't wear gloves at tea."

"You can stop out all night for all I care," said Clowes. "I'm sick of the sight of you."

Then Laura knew that the Golden Age was over.

Isabel had refused to go to bed. She had no nerves: she saw life in its proper colours without refraction. The dreadful scene at Wancote had made its full impression on her, but she was not beset like Hyde by visions of what might have been. Still she was tired and subdued, and when Verney had dressed her arm she announced her intention of spending the afternoon in the garden out of the way of kind enquiries: and she settled herself on an Indian chair behind a thicket of lilac and syringa, while Val and Rowsley and Yvonne brought books and cushions and chocolate and eau de cologne to comfort beauty in distress.

But she had reckoned without the wicket gate in the garden wall, which Lawrence let himself in by. He caught sight of her as he crossed the lawn and came up to her bare-headed. "How are you?" he asked without preface. "Better now?"

His informality went against the grain of Isabel's taste: he had no right to presume on a forced situation: with what fastidious modesty Val would have drawn back! She was tired, and she did not want to be reminded of what had happened in the morning. She shut up her book, but kept a finger in the place. "Thank you. I'm sorry the others are all out."

"Mrs. Clowes sent me on ahead."

For the second time she had made Lawrence redden like a girl, and his easy manner deserted him. Isabel unconsciously let the book slip from her hand. The lives of the Forsythe family were less absorbing than her own life when this fiery dramatic glow was shed over it. A singular smile flitted over her lips: "Well, you may as well sit down now you are here," she observed. Lawrence sat down in a deck chair and Isabel's smile broadened: she was laughing at him and teasing him with her eyes, though what she said remained conventional to the point of primness. "Is Laura coming to see me? How sweet of her! But what a pity she couldn't come with you! Why couldn't she?"

"I believe she stayed to look after my cousin."

"How is Major Clowes? Did he have a good night and was he in a— was he cheerful today?"

"So-so: he's not a great talker, is he?"

Isabel's speaking face expressed dissent. "Perhaps not when he's in a good temper. Oh, I'm so sorry, I'm always forgetting he's your cousin."

"I'm prone to forget it myself. I've seen so little of him."

"('Though the blase-man-of-the-world had seen thousands of superbly beautiful women in elegant creations by Paquin or Worth, his gaze was riveted as by a mesmeric attraction on the innocent young girl in her simple little white muslin frock, with her lissome ankles and slim, sunburnt hands.') Laura said you had been a great traveller. Shall you settle down in England?"

"Not unless I marry."

Isabel declined this topic, on which Mrs. Jack Bendish would have expatiated. "Laura says you have a lovely old house in Somersetshire. It must be jolly to have an ancestral house."

"Mine is not ancestral," said Lawrence amused. "My father bought it forty years ago at the time of the agricultural depression. It belonged to some county people—Sir Frank Fleet—who couldn't afford to keep it up. It is a lovely place, Farringay, but it's full of Fleet ghosts and the neighbourhood doesn't let me forget that I'm an alien."

"But how absurd! how narrow-minded!" exclaimed Isabel. "Houses must change hands now and then, and I dare say your father was a better landlord than the Fleets were. Besides, see how much worse it might have been! There's Wilmerdings, here in Chilmark, that the Morleys have taken: his name isn't Morley at all, Yvonne says it's Moss in the City: but they foreclosed on the Orr-Matthews' mortgage and turned them out, and that darling old place is delivered over to a horrid little Jew!"

"Poor Morley!" said Lawrence laughing. "I am a Jew myself." Isabel was stricken dumb. "I thought I had better tell you than let you hear it from some one else. No, don't apologize! these things will happen, and I'm not deeply hurt, for I refuse to call sibb with a Moss-Morley. I should never foreclose on any one's mortgage. My mother was an Englishwoman and my father was a Levantine—half Jew, half Greek. Have you never heard of Andrew Hyde the big curio dealer in New Bond Street? He was commonly known as old Hyde-and-seek. The Hyde galleries are famous. As I remember him he was a common-looking little old man with a passion for art."

"Well, I'm sorry I said such a stupid thing," said Isabel, still very red, "not because of hurting your feelings, for it isn't likely that anything I said would do that—but because it was stupid in itself, and narrow-minded, and snobbish. It'll be a lesson to me. All the same, it's interesting." She had forgotten by now that she was an innocent-young-girl and Lawrence a blase-man-of-the-world, and had slipped into a vein of intimacy which was fast charming Lawrence out of all his caution. "I suppose you take after your father, and that's why you're so unlike Major Clowes. He is a Clowes, but you're a Hyde."

"What does that mean?"

Isabel waited a moment to think it out. "You're more of a cosmopolitan; I expect you have a passion for art too, like your father. Major Clowes hasn't. He doesn't care two pins for the beauty of his old swords and daggers, he cares only for getting all the different sorts. You, perhaps, might care almost too much." Lawrence dropped his eyes. "And you vary more, you're not always the same, you have more facets: one can see you've done all sorts of things and mixed with all sorts of people. I suppose that's why you're so easily bored—I don't mean to be rude!"

"At the present moment I am deeply interested. Go on: it charms me to be dissected to my face, and by such an able hand."

"No: it's absurd and I never meant to begin it. Of course I don't know a bit what you're like."

"God forbid!" Lawrence murmured:—"Guess away and I'll tell you if you're right."

"You won't play fair. You won't own up and you'll get cross if I do."

"Not I, I have the most amiable temper in the world."

"Now I wonder if that's true?" said Isabel, scrutinizing him closely. "Perhaps you wouldn't often take the trouble to get in a wax. Oh well," surrendering at indiscretion, "then I guess that you care for very few people and for those few very much."

"Missed both barrels. I like any number of people and I shouldn't care if I never saw one of them again."

Isabel laughed. "I said you wouldn't play fair."

"Don't you believe me?"

"No, of course not. You wouldn't say it if it were true."

Lawrence drew a deep breath and looked away. Their nook of turf was out of sight of the house, sheltered from it behind a great thicket of lilac and syringa, which walled off the lawn from the kitchen garden full of sweet-smelling currant bushes and apple-trees laden with green fruit. The sleepy air was alive with gilded wasps, and between the stiffly-drooping apple-branches, with their coarse foliage, and the pencilled frieze of stonecrop and valerian waving along the low stone boundarywall, there was a dim honey-coloured expanse that stretched away like an inland sea, where, the afternoon sunshine lay in a yellow haze over brown and yellow and blue tracts of the Plain. Nothing was to be heard but the drone of wings near at hand and the whirr of a haycutter far down in the valley. No one was near and summer lay heavy on the land.

"I did care once. . I had a bad smash in my life when I was little more than a boy." He dragged a heavy gold band from his finger. "That was my wedding ring."

"Oh ... I'm sorry!" faltered Isabel. She was stunned by the extraordinary confidence.

"I married out of my class. It was when I was at Cambridge. She was a beautiful girl but she was not a lady. Her father was a tobacconist in the Cury, and Lizzie liked to serve in the shop. As she didn't want to lose her character nor I my degree, we compromised on secret nuptials. I took a house for her in Newham where I could go and visit her. I ought not to tell you the rest of the story."

"Oh yes, you can," said Isabel simply. "I hear all sorts of stories in the village."

So childish in some ways, so mature in others, she saw that Lawrence was longing to unbosom himself, and her instinct was to listen quietly, for, after all, this, though the strangest, was not the first such confidence that had been poured into her ear. She and her brother Val were alike in occasionally hearing secrets that had never been told to any one else. Why? Probably because they never gave advice, never moralized, never thought of themselves at all but only of the friend in distress. Isabel took Hyde's hand and held it closely, palm to palm. "Tell me all about it."

"There was another fellow at Trinity who had been in the Sixth at Eton with me, a year older than I was, a very brilliant man and as hard as nails: Rendell, his name was: an athlete, a tophole centre-forward, with a fascinating Irish manner and blazing blue eyes. To him I told my tale, because we were Damon and Pythias, and I couldn't have kept a secret from him to save my life. I was an ingenuous youngster in those days: never was such a pal as my pal! He saw me through my marriage and afterwards I took him with me once or twice to Myrtle Villa: it may illuminate the situation if I say that it made me all the prouder of Lizzie when I saw Rendell admired her: never was such an idyll as my manage a trois! Unluckily, one evening when I turned up unexpectedly I found them together."

"Oh! . . . What did you do?"

"Nothing. There was nothing to be done. I wasn't going to ruin myself by divorcing her. Luckily the war broke out and Rendell and I both enlisted the next day. He was killed fighting by my side at Neuve Chapelle, and I had the job of breaking the news to Lizzie. She was royally angry, poor Lizzle: told me I had no right to be alive when a better man than myself was dead. I agreed: Rendell was—the better man, though he didn't behave well to me. He died better than he lived. Out there it didn't seem to matter much. He died in my arms."

"Did you forgive your wife?"

"I never lived with her again, if that's what you mean. If I had been willing, which I wasn't, she never would have consented. She had the rather irrational prejudices of her type and class, and persisted in regarding me, or professing to regard me, as answerable for Rendell's death. It wasn't true," said Lawrence, turning his eyes on Isabel without any attempt to veil their agony. "If I'd meant to shoot him I should have shot him to his face. But I'd have saved him if I could. How on earth could any one do anything in such a hell as Neuve Chapelle? That week every officer in my company was either killed or wounded. But Lizzie had no imagination. She couldn't get beyond the fact that I was alive and he was dead."

"What became of her?"

"I'm sorry to say she went to the bad. She had money from both of us, but she spent it in public houses—didn't seem to care what happened to her after losing Arthur: a wretched life: it ended last January with her death from pneumonia after measles. That was what brought me back to England; I couldn't stand coming home before."

"Was it a relief when she died?"

"No, I was sorry," said Hyde. His wide black eyes, devil-driven beyond reticence, were riveted on Isabel's: apparently she no longer existed for him except as the Chorus before whom he could strip himself of the last rag of his reserve. "It brought it all back. I was besotted when I married her, and I remembered all that when I saw her dead. I forgot the other men. It was just as it was when Arthur died. I couldn't do anything for him, and he was in agony: he was shot through the stomach: it didn't seem to matter then that he had robbed me of Lizzie. I couldn't even get him a drop of water to drink. He died hard, did Rendell. It wasn't true, what Lizzie said. I'd have given my life for him. But I couldn't even make it easy for him to go."

"Poor Rendell," said Isabel softly, "and poor you! Oh, I'm so sorry—I'm so sorry!"

She was not afraid of Hyde now nor shy of him, she felt only an immense pity for him—this man who for no conceivable reason and without the slightest warning had flung the weight of his terrible past on her young shoulders. She longed to comfort him. But he was inaccessibly far away, isolated, his voice rapid and hard and clear, his manner normal: every nerve stripped bare but still rigid. Inexperienced as she was, Isabel had a shrewd idea of his immediate need. She took up the ring that Lawrence had wrenched off and slipped it on his finger again.

"Don't do that," said Lawrence starting: "why do you do that?"

"But I shall love to see you wear it," said Isabel. "It's the sign that you've forgiven them both."

"Have I?"

"Of course you have. You loved them too much not to forgive."

"It is true. But I hate myself for it," said Lawrence. "I hate your etiolated Christian ethics. I don't believe in the forgiveness of sins. The complaisant husband, O God! If I'd had the spirit of a man, I should have shot Arthur the night—that night—. . . .

"But you loved him," said Isabel, "and your wife too. You felt revenge and hate and passion, but love was stronger: and love is nobler than hate. They betrayed you, but you never betrayed them. It wasn't unmanly of you, it was defeat and dishonour for them, not for you, when Rendell, after that great wrong he had done you, when you tried to make it easy for him to go."

"May I—?" said Lawrence.

He leaned his face down on her open palms, and she felt the tears that she could not see. He could not control them, and indeed after the first racking agony, when he felt as though his will were being torn out of him by the roots, he made no effort to control them, releasing Isabel and dropping at full length upon the turf. Nothing else, no torment of his own thoughts, not Rendell's last pangs nor his wife's beauty young again in death had ever made Hyde weep: if Rendell had died hard, Lawrence had lived equally hard, locking up his frightful trouble in his own breast, escaping from it when he could, cursing it and fighting against it when it threatened to overpower him. But now he surrendered to it and acknowledged to himself that it had broken his life. And he felt no shame, not one iota, nothing but a profound soulagement: the proud reticent man, too vain to shed tears in his own room alone, wept voluntarily before Isabel, uncovering for her pity the wounds not only of grief but of rage and humiliation.

Such an outbreak would have been impossible in a man of pure English blood, and in a pure Oriental it would have manifested itself differently, but Isabel had truly said of Hyde that his temperament was not homogeneous: the mixed strain in him betrayed him into strange incongruities of strength and weakness. Isabel shut her eyes to incongruity. She gave him without stint the pitying gentleness he thirsted for. She refused now to contrast him with her brother. Certainly Val's judgment would have been cutting and curt. But just? Hardly. By instinct Isabel felt that her brother's clear, sane, English mind had not all the factors necessary for judging this collapse.

Her imagination was at work in the shadow: "'the night—that night. . . ." How do men live through such hours? She saw Lizzie as a chocolate-box beauty, but redeemed from hebetude by her robust youth: able to attract Hyde by his love of luxury and to hold him by main force: uneducated, coarse, and cruel, but not weak. What a disastrous marriage! doomed from the outset, even if no Rendell had come on the scene. Isabel dismissed Rendell rather scornfully: in that night at Myrtle Villa she felt pretty sure that the duel had been fought out between husband and wife: the very staging of it, picturesque for Lizzie Hyde and tragic for her husband, must for the entrapped lover have taken a frame of ignominious farce. A gleam shot through Isabel's eyes-as she imagined Rendell trying to face Hyde, and Hyde sparing him and sending him away untouched. No, no! as between the two men, the honours lay with Hyde.

But as between him and Lizzie? There the reckoning was not so easy. His wife had set scars on him that would never wear out. Dimly Isabel guessed that since coming out of her destructive hands Hyde himself could be both coarse and cruel: the seed of brutality must have been in him all along, but Myrtle Villa had fertilized it. If he married again, what would be required of Lizzie's successor? A strange deep smile gave to Isabel's young lips the wisdom of the women of all the ages. Love that gives without stint asking for no recompense: love that understands yet will not criticize nor listen to criticism: love that dares to deny its lover for his own sake.

After collapse came quiescence, and, after a long quiescence, revival. Hyde raised himself on his arm and felt for his handkerchief—indifferent to Isabel's observation, or soothed by it: his features were ravaged. Isabel drenched her own handkerchief in Mrs. Bendish's eau-de cologne and gave it him, dripping wet. "Take this, it will do you good."

"Thank you" said Lawrence, exhausted and subdued.

Becoming gradually rather more composed, he raised his eyes again. "What must you think of me? It is beyond apology. Will you ever forgive me?"

"There's nothing to forgive: I'm not hurt."

"You're rather young to hear such a history as mine."

She blushed. "Val says it doesn't matter what one knows so long as one doesn't think about it in the wrong way." With her sweet friendly smile, she touched with her fingertip the lapel of his coat: an airy gesture, but there was a fire as well as sweetness in Isabel, and for his life Lawrence could not repress a start. "You mustn't mind me, Captain Hyde. You needn't mind, because you couldn't help it. One can keep a secret for twenty years but not for ever, and for confessor I suppose any woman will do better than a man, won't she? It's not as though I should ever tell any one else: I never will, I promise you that. You'll go away and never see me again, and it'll be as though no one knew or as though I were dead."

Touching innocence! Did she indeed imagine that after such a scene . . .?

"But I do not care two straws," said Lawrence, "so spare your consolations! On the contrary, it has been a great relief to me. It's as if you had unlocked a door. The prisoner you have set free thanks you. I was only afraid it might have been too much for you, but you're made of strong stuff. Yet I don't suppose you ever saw a man weep before: well, you've seen it now: mon Dieu, mon Dieu, but I am tired! But you've let yourself in for a considerable responsibility."

"For what?"

"For me. Do you think it can ever again be the same between us?" On one knee by Isabel's chair, Hyde laughed down at her with his brilliant eyes, irreticent and unsparing of timidity in others. "Do you think I could have leaned my head on any hands but yours?"

He came too near, he touched her. Isabel had gone through a great deal that day, but, with the cruel and sordid history of Hyde's married life fresh in her mind, none of the material horrors at Wancote had produced in her such a shuddering recoil as now. His wife had not been dead six months! "Captain Hyde, how dare you?"

"I beg your pardon."

Lawrence drew himself up, a good-humoured smile on his lips: but they were pale. "I—I didn't mean to hurt you," faltered Isabel, as the tension of his silence reached her. What right had she, a young girl, to impose her own code of delicacy on a man of Hyde's age and standing?—Lawrence looked at her searchingly and his eyes changed, the sad irony died out of them, and rapidly, imperceptibly, he returned to his normal manner.

"Nor I to frighten you. Why, what a child it is, after all! Yes, your hands are strong, but they aren't practised yet. Never mind, you shall forget or remember anything you like, except this one thing which it pleases me and may please you to remember that I'm very glad you know the worst and weakest of me—"

"Isabel, are you there?"

Thus daily life revenges itself on those who forget its existence.

"That is Val's voice," said Lawrence. He stood up, no longer pale. "Heavens, I can't face him!"

"Oh dear!" said Isabel in dismay. She was no more anxious for them to meet than Lawrence was, but Val's footstep on the turf was dangerously near. But he was making for the middle of the lilac-hedge, for the red rose archway and the asphalt walk between reddening apple trees: and Isabel was sitting near the end, close to the garden wall. She flew out of her chair, held up a branch while Lawrence squeezed between the wall and the lilacs, and flew back and curled up again. The lilac leaves had not finished twinkling and rustling when Val appeared.

"How are you, invalid? I came home early on purpose to look after you." He was in well-worn grey riding clothes, booted and spurred, his whip in one hand and his gloves in the other: a slight, cool, well-knit figure of low tones and half-lights. "Have you had a quiet afternoon?"

"So-so," said Isabel, crimson.

"You look flushed, my darling," said Val tenderly. He sat down at the foot of Isabel's Indian chair and laid a finger on her wrist. "You don't feel feverish, do you?" The light click of the wicket gate, which meant that Lawrence was safely off the premises, enabled Isabel to say no with a sigh of relief. "It must be the hot weather. Hallo! what have we here?"

He held up the gold cigarette case which had dropped from Hyde's coat when he was lying on the grass.

"Some of Mrs. Bendish's property by the look of it," remarked Val. "Diamonds, begad! I should have thought Yvonne had better taste. But it must be hers, though the cipher doesn't seem to have a B in it. I'll guarantee it isn't Rosy's." He slipped it into his pocket. "I'll give it to Jack, I shall see him tonight at the vestry-meeting."

"It belongs to Captain Hyde."

"How do you know?"

"He's been here this afternoon."

"How long did he stay?"

"What time is it?— An hour and twenty minutes."

"What brought him?" said Val, bewildered.

Isabel was mute. . . "I don't know what you're talking about, Isabel. Has he been with you all that time? Very stupid of him when I particularly wanted you to have a quiet afternoon. When did he go?"

"He has only just gone."

"Just gone? I never saw him."

"He went by the wicket gate."

"But I came in by the wicket gate myself!" said Val. His kind serene eyes rested on his sister without a shadow of any thought behind surprise.

"I left the mare with Rowsley in the village."

Isabel sat up suddenly and wound her arms round Val's neck. "I sent him away when I heard you coming. He dodged you behind the lilacs. I didn't want to tell you he'd been here. I never should have told you if you hadn't found that case."

"You got rid of him— This minute? Because I came—? Isabel!" Stafford held her off. "It is not possible—! Listen to me: I will have an answer. I know Hyde. Has he said anything to offend you?"

"No! no! oh Val, don't be so angry!"

"Lucky for him," said Val, drawing a long breath and sitting down again, his whip across his knee. "My dear little sister, you mustn't make mysteries out of nothing at all! I'm sorry I startled you, but you startled me: I didn't know what to make of it. Hyde has not a very good name. . . . In fact I'd rather you didn't see too much of him unless Rose or I were there: it was cheek of him to come up this afternoon when I was out, considering that he scarcely knows you: but I suppose he thinks the Wancote show gives him right of entry. That is the sort of thing a chap like Hyde does think. Now begin again and tell me what it's all about."

"Oh, nothing, Val, nothing!" said Isabel, laughing, though the tears were not far from her eyes. "I didn't know you could get in such a wax if you tried! It's as you say, a little mystery of nothing at all. I'd tell you like a shot if I could, but I can't because it would be breaking a promise."

"Hyde had no earthly right to make you promise."

"It was of my own accord."

"It is all wrong," said Val. "Promises and silly secrets between a child like you and a fellow like Hyde!" He was more grave and vexed than Isabel had ever seen him. "There must be no more of it."

"There won't if I can help it!" said Isabel. "I like Captain Hyde—yes, I do: I know you don't, and I can quite see that he's what Rose would call a bit of an outsider, but I'm sorry for him and there's a great deal I like in him. But I don't want to see him again for years and years." She gave a little shiver of distaste: if anything had been wanting to heighten the reaction of her youth against Hyde's stained middle age, the evasions in which he had involved her would have done it. "Now don't scold me any more! I'm innocent, and I feel rather sad. The world looks unhomely this afternoon. All except you! You stay there where I can watch you: you're so comfortably English, so nice and cool and quiet! There's no one like you, no one: the more I see of other people the more I like you! I'm so glad you don't wear linen clothes and a Panama hat and rings. I'd give you away if you did with half a pound of tea. No, it's no use asking me any more questions because I shan't answer them: a promise is all the more binding if one would rather not keep it. No, and it's no use fishing either, I can keep a secret as well as you can—"

She broke off before the white alteration in Val's face.

"Has—.

"No," said Isabel slowly: "no, he never mentioned your name."



CHAPTER XI

"Val"

"M'm."

"I say"

"What, then?"

"What's all this about the Etchingham agency?"

Val Stafford, smoking a well-earned pipe some hours later in the evening sunlight on the vicarage lawn, looked up at his brother over the Chronicle with a faint frown. "Who?"

"Ah! who?" said Rowsley, squatting cross-legged on the turf.

"Jack began on it this afternoon, and I had to switch him off, for I didn't care to own that it was news to me."

"There's nothing in it at present."

"The duke has offered me the management of his Etchingham property," said Val unwillingly. "Oh no, not to give up Bernard: Etchingham, you see, marches with Wanhope and the two could be run together. He was awfully nice about it: would take what time I could give him: quite saw that Wanhope would have to come first."

"How much?"

"Four hundred and an allowance for a house. Five, to be precise, which is what he is giving Mills: but of course I couldn't take full time pay for a part-time job."

Rowsley whistled.

"Yes, it would be very nice," said Val, always temperate. "It would practically be 300 pounds, for I couldn't go on taking my full 300 pounds from Bernard. I should get him to put on a young fellow to work under me."

"It would make a lot of difference to you, even so."

"To us," Val corrected him. "Another pound a week would oil the wheels of Isabel's housekeeping. And—" he hesitated, but having gone so far one might as well go on—"it would enable me to do two things I've long set my heart on, only it was no use saying so: give you another hundred and fifty a year and insure my life in Isabel's favour. It would lift a weight off my mind if I could do that. Suppose I were to die suddenly—one never knows what would become of her? She'll be able to earn her own living after taking her degree in October, but women's posts are badly paid and it's uncommonly hard to save. Oh yes, old boy, I know you'd look after her! But I don't want her to be a drag on you: it's bad enough now—you never grumble, but I know what it's like never to have a penny to spare. Times have changed since I was in the Army, but nothing alters the fact that it's uncommonly unpleasant to be worse off than other fellows. I hate it for you—all the more because you don't grumble. It is a constant worry to me not to be able to put you in a better position."

Rowsley had been too long inured to this paternal tenderness to be sensible of its touching absurdity on the lips of a man not much older than himself. But he was not a selfish youth, and he remonstrated with Val, though more like a son than a brother. "Yes, I dare say, but where do you come in? A stiff premium for Isabel and 50 pounds for Jim and 150 pounds for me doesn't leave much change out of 300 pounds!"

"Oh, I've all I want. Living at home, I don't get the chance of spending a lot of pocket money."

"Why don't you close at once?"

"Because I can't get an answer out of Bernard. I've spoken to him but he won't decide one way or the other. And he's my master, and I can't take on another job if he objects. That's why I kept it dark at home: what's the good of raising hopes that may be disappointed?"

"Pity you can't chuck Bernard and take on Etchingham and the five hundred."

"I should never do that," said Val in the rare tone of decision which in him was final. "After all these years I could never leave Bernard in the lurch. I owe him too much."

"As if the boot weren't on the other leg!" Rowsley muttered. He was not mercenary—none of Mr. Stafford's children were: he saw eye to eye with Val in Val's calm preference of six to eight hundred a year: but when Val carried his financial principles into the realm of sentiment Rowsley now and then lost his temper. His brother smiled at him, amused by his irritation, unmoved by it: other men's opinions rarely had any weight with Val Stafford.

"Pax till it happens, at all events! Honestly I don't think Bernard means to object: he's been all smiles the last day or two—Hyde's coming has shaken him up and done him good—"

"Oh! Hyde!"

Val let fail his paper and looked curiously at Rowsley, whose tone was a challenge. "What is it now?"

"Do you like this chap Hyde?"

"That depends on what you mean by liking him. He's not a bad specimen of his class."

"What is his class? Do you know anything of his people?"

"Of his family I know little except that he has Jew blood in him and is very well off," Val could have told his brother where the money came from, but forbore out of consideration for Lawrence, who might not care to have his connection with the Hyde Galleries known in Chilmark. "He came here because Lucian Selincourt asked him to see if he could do anything for Bernard."

"I can't see Hyde putting himself out of his way to oblige Mr. Selincourt."

"If you ask me, Rose, I should say he had only just got back to England and was at a loose end. But there was a dash of good nature in it: he's genuinely fond of Mrs. Clowes."

"So I gathered," said Rowsley. His tone was pregnant. Val sat silent for a moment.

"What rubbish! He hasn't seen her for eight or ten years."

"Since her marriage." Val shrugged his shoulders. "Sorry, Val, but I cannot see Hyde staying on at Wanhope out of cousinly affection for Bernard Clowes. It must be a beastly uncomfortable house to stay in. Nicely run and all that, and they do you very well, but Bernard is distinctly an acquired taste. Oh, my dear chap!" as Val's silence stiffened, "no one suggests that Laura's ever looked at the fellow! But facts are facts, and Hyde is— Hyde. I'm not a bit surprised to hear he has Jew blood in him," Rowsley continued, warming to the discussion: he was a much keener judge of character that the tolerant and easy-going Val. "That accounts for the arty strain in him. Yvonne says he's a thorough musician, and Jack told me Lord Grantchester took to him because he knew such a lot about pictures. Well, so he ought! He's a Londoner. What does he know of the country? Only what you pick up at a big country-house party or a big shoot! He's not the sort of chap to stay on at Wanhope for the pleasure of cheering up across-grained br—a fellow like Bernard. Yes, he's talking of staying on indefinitely: is going to send to town for one of his confounded cars. . . . And what other woman is there in Chilmark that he'd walk across the road to look at?"

"I'm not sure you're fair to him."

Rowsley turned up to his brother an amused, rather sweet smile. "Val, you'd pray for the devil?"

"Oh, Hyde isn't a devil! I came pretty close to him ten years ago. He has a streak of generosity in him: no one knows that better than I do, for I'm in his debt. What? Oh! no, not in money matters: is that likely? But he's capable of . . . magnanimity, one might call it," Stafford fastidiously felt after precision: "no, he wouldn't pursue Laura; he wouldn't make her life harder than it is already."

"He might propose to make it easier." Rowsley threw a daisy at a cockchafer and missed it. "You and I are sons of a parsonage. We shouldn't run off with a married lady because it would be against our principles." His thin brown features were twisted into a faint grimace. Rowsley, like Val, possessed a satirical sense of humour, and gave it freer play than Val did. "It's so difficult to shake off early prejudices. When Fowler and I were at the club the other day, we met a horrid little sweep who waxed confidential. I said I couldn't make love to a married woman if I tried, and Fowler said he could but held rather not, and we walked off, but as I remarked to Fowler afterwards the funny thing was that it was true. I don't see anything romantic in the situation. It strikes me as immoral and disgusting. But Hyde wouldn't take a narrow view like mine. He has to live up to his tailor."

"Oh, really, Rose!" Val gave his unwilling laugh. "You're like Isabel, who can't forgive him for sporting a diamond monogram."

"No, but I'm interested. I know Jack's limitations, and Jimmy's, and yours, but Hyde's I don't know, and he intrigues me," said Rowsley, lighting a cigarette with his agile brown fingers. "Now I'll tell you the way he really strikes me. He's not a bad sort: I shouldn't wonder if there were more decency in him than he'd care to get credit for. But I should think," he looked up at Val with his clear speculative hazel eyes, "that he's never in his life taken a thrashing. He's always had pots of money and superb health. I know nothing, of his private concerns, but at all events he isn't married, and from what Jack says he's sought safety in numbers. No wife, no kids, no near relations—that means none of the big wrenches. No: I don't believe Hyde's ever taken a licking in his life."

"You sound as if you would like to administer one."

"Only by way of a literary experiment," said Rowsley with his mischievous grin. He was of the new Army, Val of the old: it was a constant source of mild surprise to Val that his brother read books about philosophy, and psychology, and sociology, of which pre-war Sandhurst had never heard: read poetry too, not Tennyson or Shakespeare, but slim modern volumes with brown covers and wide margins: and wrote verses now and then, and sent them to orange-coloured magazines or annual anthologies, at which Val gazed from a respectful distance. "I don't owe him any grudge. I'm not Bernard's dry-nurse!"

Val turned a leaf of his paper, but he was not reading it.

"I rather wish you hadn't said all this, Rowsley. It does no good: not even if it were true."

"Val, if it weren't such a warm evening I'd get up and punch your head. You're a little too bright and good, aren't you? Yvonne Bendish says it, and she's Laura's sister."

"Yvonne would say anything. I wish you had given her a hint to hold her tongue. She may do most pestilent mischief if she sets this gossip going."

"It'll set itself going," said Rowsley. "And, though I know the Bendishes pretty well, I really shouldn't care to tell Mrs. Jack not to gossip about her own sister. You might see your way to it, reverend sir, but I don't."

"If it came to Bernard's ears I wouldn't answer for the consequences."

"Won't Bernard see it for himself?"

"If I thought that," said Val, "if I thought that. . . .

"You couldn't interfere, old man," said Rowsley with a shrewd glance at his brother. "Your hands are tied."

"H'm: yes, that's true." It was much truer than Rowsley knew. "I don't care," said Val, involuntarily crushing the paper in his hand: "I would not let that stand in my way: I'd speak to Hyde."

"Are you prepared to take high ground? I can't imagine any one less likely to be amenable to moral suasion, unless of course you're much more intimate with him than you ever let on to me. Perhaps you are," Rowsley added. "He certainly is interested in you."

"Hyde is?"

"Watches you like a cat after a mouse. What's at the root of it, Val? Is it the original obligation you spoke of? I'm not sure that I should care to be under an obligation to Hyde myself. Hullo, are you off?" Val had risen, folding the newspaper, laying it carefully down on his chair: in all his ways he was as neat as an old maid.

"I have to be at the managers' meeting by half past eight, and it's twenty past now."

Watching his brother across the lawn, Rowsley cudgelled his brains to account for Val's precipitate departure. The pretext was valid, for Val was always punctual, and yet it looked like a retreat—not to say a rout. But what had he said to put Val to flight?

Present at the managers' meeting were Val, still in breeches: Jack Bendish in a dinner jacket and black tie: Garrett the blacksmith, cursorily washed: Thurlow, a leading Nonconformist tradesman: and Mrs. Verney the doctor's wife. Agenda: to instruct the Correspondent to requisition a new scrubbing brush for the Infants' School. This done and formally entered in the Minutes by Mrs. Verney, the meeting resolved itself into a Committee of Ways and Means for getting rid of the boys' headmaster without falling foul of the National Union of Teachers; but these proceedings, though of extreme interest to all concerned, were recorded in no Minutes.

The meeting broke up in amity and Bendish came out into the purple twilight, taking Val's arm. It was gently withdrawn. "Neuritis again?" said Jack. "Why don't you try massage?" He always asked the same question, and, being born to fifteen thousand a year, never read between the lines of Val's vague reply. Val had a touch of neuritis in his injured arm two nights out of seven, but he could not find the shillings for his train fare to Salisbury, far less the fees of a professional masseuse. Bendish, who could have settled that difficulty out of a week's cigar bills, would have been shocked and distressed if Val had owned to it, but it was beyond the scope of his imagination, though he was a thoughtful young man and quietly did his best to protect Val from the tax of chauffeurs and gamekeepers. He understood that poor men cannot always find sovereigns. But he really did not know that sometimes they cannot even find shillings. Tonight he said, "I can't think why you don't get a woman over to massage you," and then, reverting to the peccant master, "Brown's a nuisance. He has a rotten influence on the elder boys. He's thick with all that beastly Labour crowd, and I believe Thurlow's right about his goings on with Warner's wife, though I wasn't going to say so to Thurlow. I do wish he'd do something, then we could fire him. But we don't want a row with the N.U.T."

"You can't fire a man for his political opinions."

"Why not, if they're wrong?" said Bendish placidly.

His was the creed that Labour men are so slow to understand because it is so slow to explain itself: not a blind prejudice, but the reasonable faith of one who feels himself to belong to an hereditary officer caste for whom privilege and responsibility go hand in hand. And an excellent working rule it is so long as practice is not divorced from theory: so long as the average member of the governing class acts up to the tradition of government, be he sachem or daimio or resident English squire. It amused Val: but he admired it.

"Brown is a thorn in Jimmy's side," he remarked, dropping the impersonal issue. "I never in my life heard a man make such a disagreeable noise on the organ. I tackled him about it last Sunday. He said it ciphered, but organs don't cipher in dry weather, so I went to look at it and found three or four keys glued together with candle grease."

"Filthy swine! Are you coming round to Wanhope? I have to call in on my way home, my wife's dining there."

Val made no reply. "Are you coming up or not? You look fagged, Val," said Bendish affectionately. "Anything wrong?"

"No: I was only wondering whether I'd get you to take a message for me, but I'd better go myself."

Bendish nodded. "Just as you like. Have you settled yet about the Etchingham agency?"

"No, I'm waiting for Bernard."

"Hope you'll see your way to accepting. My only fear is that it would throw too much work on you; you're such a conscientious beggar! but of course you wouldn't do for us all the odd jobs you do for poor Bernard. Seems to me," Jack ruminated, "the best plan would be for you to have a car. One gets about quicker like that and it wouldn't be such a fag. There's that little green Napier roadster, she'd come in handy if we stabled her at Nicholson's." He added simply, to obviate any possible misunderstanding, "Garage bills our show, of course."

"Thanks most awfully," said Val, accepting without false pride. "I should love it, I do get tired after being in the saddle all day. It would more than make up for the extra work."

They were crossing the Wanhope lawn as he spoke, on their way to the open French windows of the parlour, gold-lit with many candles against an amethyst evening sky. Laura, in a plain black dress, was at the piano, the cool drenched foliage of Claude Debussy's rainwet gardens rustling under her magic fingers. Bernard was talking to Mrs. Jack Bendish, for the sufficient reason that she disliked him and disliked talking to any one while Laura played. Her defiant sparkle, her gipsy features, her slim white shoulders emerging from the brocade and sapphires of a sleeveless bodice cut open almost to her waist, produced the effect of a Carolus Duran lady come to life and threw Laura back into a dimmed and tired middle age. Jack's eyes glowed as they dwelt on her. His marriage had been a trial to his family, but no one could deny that Yvonne had made a success of it, for Jack worshipped her.—Lawrence, leaning forward in his chair, his forehead on his hand to shield his eyes from the light, looked exceedingly tired, and probably was so.

"Queer chap Hyde," said Bendish to Val as they waited on the grass for the music to finish. "Can't think what he's stopping on for."

"Oh, Jack, for heaven's sake don't you begin on that subject!"

"Hey? Oh! No, by Jove. Seems a shame, doesn't it?" returned Bendish, taking the point with that rapid effortless readiness of his class which made him more soothing to Val than many a cleverer man. "It all says itself, so what's the good of saying it? All the same I shan't be sorry when Hyde packs his movin' tent a day's march nearer Jerusalem." And with a casual wink at Val he stepped over the threshold. His judgment, so vague and shrewd and sure of itself, represented probably the kindest view that would be taken in Chilmark.

Their entrance broke up the gathering. Jack carried off his wife, and Barry appeared to wheel Bernard away to bed. With a word to Laura, Val followed the cripple to his room. The Duke was pressing for an answer, and long experience had taught Val that for Bernard one time was as good as another: it was not possible to count on his moods. And there was not much to be said; all pros and cons had been thrashed out before; the five minutes while Barry was out of the room fetching Bernard's indispensable hot-water bottles would give Val ample time to secure Bernard's consent.—Laura had scarcely finished putting away her music when Val came back, humming under his breath the jangled tune that echoes night in the streets of Granada. Laura glanced at Lawrence, who had gone into the garden to smoke and was passing and repassing the open window: no, he could not hear. "Well, Val?"

"Let me do that for you, shall I?" said Val, lightly smiling, at her. "Your ottoman has a heavy lid."

"Have you spoken to Bernard?"

"I have."

"And it's all right?"

"Yes" said Val, deftly flinging diamond-wise a glittering Chinese cloth: "is that straight?—that is, for me. I shan't take the agency."

"Val!"

"Bernard agrees with me that the double work would be too heavy. Of course I should like the money and I'm awfully sorry to disoblige Lord Grantchester and Jack, but one has one's limitations, and I don't want to knock up."

"It is too bad—too bad of Bernard,". said Laura, lowering her voice as Lawrence lingered near the window. "He doesn't half deserve your goodness to him."

"Bosh!" said Val laughing. "Where do these candlesticks go? In my heart of hearts I'm grateful to him. I'm a cowardly beggar, Laura, and I was dreading the big financial responsibility. Oh no, Bernard didn't put any pressure on me: simply offered me the choice between Etchingham and Wanhope."