"They would pay you twice what you get from Bernard. Oh, Val, I wish you would take it and throw us over!"

"That's very unkind of you."

"Is this definite?"

"Quite: Bernard had thought it well over and made up his mind. I shouldn't speak to him about it if I were you."

"I shan't. I couldn't bear to."

"Bosh again—excuse me. I must go home. Good-night, dear." He held out his hand, wishing, in the repressed way that had become a second nature to him, that Laura would not wring it so warmly and so long. In the first bitterness of disappointment—so much the keener for his unlucky confidence to Rowsley—Val could not stand sympathy. Not even from Laura? Least of all from Laura. He nodded to her with a bright careless smile and went out into the night.

But he had still one more mission to perform before he could go home to break the bad news to Rowsley: a trying mission under which Val fretted in repressed distaste. He came up to Lawrence holding out the gold cigarette case. "You dropped this at our place when you were talking to my sister this afternoon."

"Did I?" Lawrence slipped it into his pocket. His manner was perfectly calm. "Thanks so much.—I hadn't missed it." He had no fear of having been betrayed, in essentials, by Isabel.

"I don't want to offend you," Val continued with his direct simplicity of manner, "but perhaps you hardly realize how young my sister is."

"Some one said she was nineteen, but why?"

"I don't know what you said to her, probably nothing of the slightest consequence, but she's only a child, and you managed to upset her. To be frank, I didn't want her to see any one this afternoon. Oh, she's all right, but her arm has run her up a bit of a temperature, and Verney wants her to keep quiet for a few days. It'll give her an excuse to keep clear of the inquest too. This sounds ungrateful as well as ungracious, when we owe you so much, but there's no ingratitude in it, only common sense."

"Oh, damn your common sense!" exclaimed Lawrence.

It was as laconic a warning-off as civility allowed: and it irritated Lawrence beyond bearing to be rebuked by young Stafford, whose social life stood in his danger, whom he could at pleasure strip to universal crucifying shame. But there was neither defiance nor fear in Val: tranquil and unpretentious, in his force of character he reminded Lawrence of Laura Clowes. She too had been attacked once or twice that evening by her husband, and Lawrence had admired the way in which she either foiled or evaded the rapier point, or took it to her bosom without flinching. This same silken courage, it seemed, Val also possessed. Both would stand up to a blow with the same grave dignity and—perhaps—secret scorn.

Minutes passed. Val waited because he chose not to be the first to break silence, Lawrence because he was absorbing fresh impressions with that intensity which wipes out time and place. He was in the mood to receive them: tired, softened, and quickened, from the tears of the afternoon. After all Val was Isabel's brother and possessed Isabel's eyes! This drew Lawrence to him by a double cord: practically, because it is inconvenient to be on bad terms with one's brother-in-law, and mystically, because in his profound romantic passion he loved whatever was associated with her, down to the very sprig of honeysuckle that she had pinned into his coat. But for this cord his relations with Stafford would have begun and ended in a casual regret for the casual indulgence of a cruel impulse. But Isabel's brother had ex officio a right of entry into Hyde's private life, and, the doors once opened, he was dazed by the light that Val let in.

It was after ten o'clock and dews were falling, falling from a clear night. "One faint eternal eventide of gems," beading the dark turf underfoot and the pale faces of roses that had bloomed all day in sunshine: now prodigal of scent only they hung their heads like ghosts of flowers among dark glossy leaves. Stars hung sparkling on the dark field of heaven, stars threw down their spears on the dark river fleeting to the star-roofed distant Channel. Stream and grass and leaf-buds were ephemeral and eternal, ever passing and ever renewed, old as the stars, or the waste ether in which they range: the green, sappy stem, the dew-bead that hung on it, the shape of a ripple were the same now as when Nineveh was a queen of civilization and men's flesh was reddening alive in osier cages over altar fires on Wiltshire downs. And all the sweetness, all the romance of an English midsummer night seized the heart of Lawrence, a nomad, a returned exile, and a man in love—as if he had never known England before.

Or her inhabitants either! Lawrence, without country, creed, profession, or territorial obligation, was one of those sons of rich men who form, in any social order, its loosest and most self-centred class. In his set, frank egoism was the only motive for which one need not apologize. But in Chilmark it was not so. Far other forces were in play in the lives of the Stafford family, and Laura Clowes, and Lord Grantchester and his wife and Jack Bendish. What were these forces? Lawrence thought in flashes, by imagery, scene after scene flitting before him out of the last forty-eight hours. Homespun virtues: unselfishness, indifference to money values, the constant sense of filial, fraternal, social responsibility . . . the glow in Jack's eyes when they rested on his wife: Verney's war on cesspools: Leverton Morley as scoutmaster: the Chinese lecture: rosebushes in the churchyard, by the great stone cross with its list of names beginning "George Potts, Wiltshire Rifles, aged 49," and ending "Robert Denis Bendish, Grenadier Guards, aged 19: Into Thy Hands, O Lord": old, old feudal England, closeknit, no pastoral of easy virtues, yet holding together in a fellowship which underlies class disunion: whose sons, from days long before the Conquest, have always desired to go to sea when the cuckoo sang, and to come home again when they were tired of the hail and salt showers, because they could not bear to be landless and lordless men. . . .

[Footnote]

"Swylce geac mona geomran reorde, singe sumeres weard, sorge beade bittre in breosthord; pset se beorn ne wat, secg esteadig, hwset pa sume dreoga, pe pa wrseclastas widost lecga! . . . . pince him on mode pset he his monndryhten clyppe and cysse andon cneo lecge honda and heafod; ponne onwsecne, gesihp him beforan fealwe wegas, bapian brimfuglas."

"Even so the cuckoo warns him with its sad voice, Summer's warden sings foreboding sorrow, bitter grief of heart. Little knows the prosperous fellow what others are doing who follow far and wide the tracks of exile . . . Then dreams the seafarer that he clasps his lord and kisses him, and on his knee lays hand and head; but he awakes and sees before him the fallow waterways and the sea-fowls bathing."

[End of Footnote]

Lawrence flung off the impression with a jerk of his shoulders, as if it were a physical weight. It was too heavy to be endured. Not even to marry Isabel was he going to impose on his own unbroken egoism the restricting code of a country village.

"You are a dreamer, Val! Why don't you throw over Bernard and take the Etchingham agency? Yes, I heard every word you said to Laura: you made a gallant effort, but the facts speak for themselves, and your terminological inexactitudes wouldn't deceive a babe at the breast. Bernard pays you 300 pounds a year and orders you about like a groom, Grautchester would give you six and behave like a gentleman. But no, you must needs stick to Bernard, though you never get any thanks for it! You're an unpractical dreamer."

"I don't know what on earth you're talking about."

"And you're all in it together, damn you!" Lawrence broke out with an angry laugh. "It's all equally picturesque—feudal's the word! I never knew anything like it in my life and I wouldn't have believed it could continue to exist. What do you do with gipsies? evict 'em, I suppose." He flung a second question at Val which made the son of a vicarage knit his brows.

"As a matter of fact there's a house in Brook Lane about which Bendish and I are a good deal exercised in our minds at the present moment . . . and the percentage of children born too soon after marriage is disastrous. You're all out, Hyde. Nothing could be more commonplace than Chilmark, believe me: life is like this all over rural England, and it's only from a distance that one takes it for Arcadia."

"Folly," said Lawrence. "Good God, why should you exercise your simple minds over the house in Brook Lane? Ah! because the men who go to it are your own men, and the parsonage and the Castle are answerable for their souls." Val, irritated, suggested that if Hyde's forebears had lived in Chilmark since the time when every freeman had to swear fealty, laying his hands between the knees of his lord, Hyde might have shared this feeling. "But they didn't," said Lawrence, drily. "My grandfather was a pawnbroker in the New Cut."

"Then perhaps you're hardly in a position to judge."

"Judge? I don't judge, my good fellow—I'm lost in admiration! In an age of materialism it's refreshing to come across these simple, homespun virtues. I didn't know there was a man left in England that would exist, for choice, on three hundred a year. Are you always content with your rustic ideals, Val? Haven't you any ambition?"

"I?" said Val.

"'Carry me out of the fight,'" quoted Lawrence under his breath. "I swear I forgot."

Silence fell again, the silence on Lawrence's part of continual conflict and adjustment, and on Val's mainly of irritation. Lawrence talked too much and too loosely, and was over-given to damning what he disliked—a trick that went with his rings and his diamond monogram. Val was not interested in a townsman's amateur satire; in so far as Lawrence was not satirical, he had probably drunk one glass more of Bernard's' champagne than was good for him! In the upshot, Val was less disinclined to credit Rowsley than half an hour ago.

Lawrence roused himself. "About your sister: I was sorry afterwards to have stayed so long. She seemed none the worse for it at the time, but no doubt she ought to keep quiet for a bit. Will you make my excuses to her?"

"I will with pleasure."

"And will you allow me to tackle Bernard about the agency?"

"To—?"

"If you won't resent my interfering? I can generally knock some sense into Bernard's head. It's an iniquitous thing that he should take advantage of your generosity, Val."

Stafford was completely taken by surprise. "I'd rather—it's most awfully kind of you," he stammered, "but I couldn't trespass on your kindness—"

"Kindness, nonsense! Bernard's my cousin: if your services are worth more in the open market than he pays you, it's up to me to see he doesn't fleece you. Otherwise you might ultimately chuck up your job, and where should we be then? In the soup: for he'd never get another man of your class—a gentleman—to put up with the rough side of his tongue. No: he must be brought to book: if you'll allow me?"

Val's disposition was to refuse; it was odious to him to accept a favour from Hyde. But pride is one of the luxuries that poor men cannot afford. "I should be most grateful. Thank you very much."

"And now go to bed: you're tired and so am I. I've had the devil of a hard day." He stretched himself, raising his wrists to the level of his shoulders, luxuriously tense under the closefitting coat. "I shall hope to see your sister again after the inquest."

"Yes," said Val, hesitating: "are you staying on, then?"

"As you advised."

"You'll be very bored."

"No, I've fallen in love." Val gave a perceptible start. "With the country," Lawrence explained with a merry laugh. "Rustic ideals. Don't misjudge me, I beg: I have no designs on Mrs. Bendish."

"Hyde . . .

"Well, my dear Val?"

"Give me back my parole."

"Not I."

"You're unjust and ungenerous," said Val with repressed passion. "But I warn you that I shall interfere none the less to protect others if necessary. Good-night."

Lawrence watched him across the lawn with a bewildered expression. But he forgot him in a minute—or remembered him only in the association with Isabel which brought Val into the radius of his good will.



CHAPTER XII

"Hadow's bringing out a new play," remarked Lawrence, looking up from the Morning Post. "A Moore comedy, They're clever stuff, Moore's comedies: always well written, and well put on when Hadow has a hand in it. You never were a playgoer, Bernard."

"Not I," said Bernard Clowes. He and his guest were smoking together in the hall after breakfast, Lawrence imparting items of news from the Morning Post, while Bernard, propped up in a sitting attitude on the latest model of invalid couch, turned over and sorted on a swing table a quantity of curios mainly in copper, steel, and iron. Both swing-table and couch had been bought in London by Lawrence, and to his vigorous protests it was also due that the great leaved doors were thrown wide to the amber sunshine: while the curios came out of one of his Eastern packing-cases, which he had had unpacked by Gaston for Bernard to take what he liked. Lawrence's instincts were acquisitive, not to say predatory. Wherever he went he amassed native treasures which seemed to stick to his fingers, and which in nine cases out of ten, thanks to his racial tact, would have fetched at Christie's more than he gave for them. Coming fresh from foreign soil, they were a godsend to Bernard, who was weary of collecting from collectors' catalogues. "Can I have this flint knife? Egyptian, isn't it? Oh, thanks awfully, I'm taking all the best." This was true. But Lawrence, like most of his nation, gave freely when he gave at all. "No, I never was one for plays except Gilbert and Sullivan and the 'Merry Widow' and things like that with catchy tunes in 'em. Choruses." He gave a reminiscent laugh.

"Legs?" suggested Lawrence.

"Exactly," said Bernard, winking at him. "Oh damn!" A mechanical jerk of his own legs had tilted the table and sent the knife rolling on the floor. Lawrence picked it up for him, drew his feet down, and tucked a rug over his hips.

"Mind that box of Burmese darts, old man, they're poisoned.— I used to be an inveterate first-nighter. Still am, in fact, when I'm in or near town. I can sit out anything from 'Here We Are Again' to 'Samson Agonistes.' To be frank, I rather liked 'Samson': it does one's ears good to listen to that austere, delicate English."

"How long would these take to polish one off?"

"Ten or twelve hours, chiefly in the form of a hoop. No, Berns, I can't recommend them." He drew from its jewelled sheath and put into Bernard's hands a Persian dagger nine inches long, the naked blade damascened in wavy ripplings and slightly curved from point to hilt. "That would do your trick better. Under the fifth rib. I bought it of a Greek muleteer, God knows how he got hold of it, but he was a bit of a poet: he assured me it would go in 'as soft as a kiss.' For its softness I cannot speak, but it is as sharp as a knife need be."

"Sharper," said Bernard, his thumb in his mouth.

"You silly ass, I warned you!— I should rather like to see this Moore play. I suppose Laura never goes, as you don't?"

"I don't stop her going, as you jolly well know. She's welcome to go six nights a week if she likes."

"She couldn't very well go alone," Lawrence ignored the scowl of his host. "Tell you what: suppose I took her tonight? I could run her up and down in my car, or we could get back by the midnight train. Would the feelings of Chilmark be outraged?"

"What business is it of Chilmark's? If I'm complaisant, that's enough," said Bernard, his features relaxing into a broad grin. "I may be planked down in a country village for the rest of my very unnatural life, but I'll be shot if I'll regulate mine or my wife'& behaviour by the twaddle they talk! I'll have that dagger." Slipping it slowly into its sheath he watched it travel home, the supple female curve gliding and yielding as a woman yields to a man's caress. "Voluptuous, I call it. Under the left breast, eh?" He drew it again and held it poised and pointing at his cousin. "Come, even I could cut your heart out with a gem of a blade like that." Lawrence held himself lightly erect, his big frame stiffening from head to foot and the pupils of his eyes dilating till the irids were blackened. "Call Laura." Bernard sheathed the dagger again and laid it down. "She's out there snipping away at the roses. Why can't she leave 'em to Parker? She's always messing about out there dirtying her hands, and then she comes in and paws me. Call her in."

Lawrence escaped into the sunshine. He had not liked that moment when Bernard had held up the dagger, nor was it the first time that Bernard had made him shiver, but these vague apprehensions soon faded in the open air. It was a sallow sunshine, a light wind was blowing, and the lawn was spun over with brilliancies of gossamer and flecked with yellow leaflets of acacia and lime. Little light clouds floated overhead, sun-smitten to a fiery whiteness, or curling in gold and silver surf over the grey of distant hayfields. In the borders the velvet bodies of bees hung between the velvet petals, ruby-red, of dahlias. There had been no frost, and yet a foreboding of frost was in the air, a sparkle, a sting—enough to have braced Lawrence when he went down to bathe before breakfast, standing stripped amid long river-herbage drenched in dew, a west wind striking cold on his wet limbs: sensations exquisite so long as the blood of health and manhood glowed under the chilled skin! It was early autumn.

Time slips away fast in a country village, and Lawrence remained a welcome guest at Wanhope, where Chilmark said—though with a covert smile—that Captain Hyde had done his cousin a great deal of good. Bernard was better behaved with Lawrence than with any one else, less surly, less unsociable, less violently coarse: since June there had been fewer quarrels with Val and Barry and the servants, and less open incivility to Laura. He had even let Laura give a few mild entertainments, arrears of hospitality which she was glad to clear off: and he had appeared at them in person, polite and well dressed, and on the friendliest terms with his cousin and his wife.

Lawrence knew his own mind now. It was because he knew it that he held his hand: meeting Isabel two or three times a week, entering into the life of the little place because it was her life, fighting Val's battle with Bernard—and winning it— because Val was her brother. When he remembered his collapse he was not abashed: shame was an emotion which he rarely felt: but he had gone too far and too fast, and was content to mark time in a more rational and conventional courtship.

But a courtship under the rose, for before others he hid his love like a crime, treating Isabel as good humoured elderly men treat pretty children. Where the astringent memory of Lizzie came into play, Lawrence was dumb. The one aspect of that fiasco which he had not fully confessed to Isabel—though only because it was not then prominent in his mind—was its scorching, its lacerating effect on his pride. But for it he would probably have flung discretion to the winds, confided in Laura, in Bernard, in Val, pursued Isabel with a hot and headstrong impetuosity: but it had left the entire tract of sex in him one seared and branded scar.

Even when they were alone together, which rarely happened—Val saw to that—he had as yet made no open love to her: it was difficult to do so when one was never secure from interruption for ten minutes together. Of late he had begun to chafe against Val's cobweb barriers. Three months is a long time! and patience was not a virtue that came natural to Lawrence Hyde.

He found Laura cutting off dead roses, a sufficiently harmless occupation, one would have thought: a trifle thinner, a trifle paler than when he came: and were those grey threads in her brown hair?

"Berns wants you," said Lawrence. "I've done such an awful thing, Laura—"

Again that flash of imperfect perception! What was going on under the surface at Wanhope, that Laura should turn as white as her handkerchief? He hurried on as if he had noticed nothing. "Bernard and I have been laying our heads together. Do you know what I'm going to do? Run you up to town to see the new Moore play at Hadow's."

"Delightful!" Already Laura had recovered herself: her smile was as sweet as ever, and as serene. "Was it your idea or Bernard's?"

"Mine. . . I say, Laura: Bernard is all right, isn't he?"

"In what way, all right?"

Lawrence reddened, regretting his indiscretion. "I've fancied his manner queer, once or twice."

"There is a close connection, of course, between the spine and the brain," said Laura quietly. "But my husband is perfectly sane. . . . Oh my dear Lawrence, of course I forgive you! what is there to forgive? I only wish I could come tonight, but I'm afraid it can't be managed—"

"She says it can't be managed," said Lawrence, standing aside for Laura to pass in. "Pitch into her, Bernard. Hear her talk like a woman of sixty! Are you frightened of the night air, Laura? Or would Chilmark chatter?"

"It might, if you and I went alone," Laura smiled.

"Make up a party then," suggested Lawrence. "Get the Bendishes to come too."

She shook her head. "They're dining with the Dean."

"And decanal dinner-parties can't be thrown over." When he made the suggestion, Lawrence had known that the Bendishes were dining with the Dean. "Some one else, then."

"Whom could I ask like this at the last moment? No, I won't go—thank you all the same. I'm not so keen on late hours and long train journeys as I used to be. Go by yourself and you can tell us all about it afterwards. Berns and I shall enjoy that as much as seeing it ourselves. Shan't we, Berns?" Clowes gave a short laugh: he could not have expressed his opinion more clearly if he had called his wife a fool to her face.

"You weren't so particular before you married me, my love. When you ran that French flat with Yvonne you jolly well knew how to amuse yourself."

"Girls do many things before they're married," said Laura vaguely. "I know better now."

"Oh, you know a lot. She ought to go, Lawrence. It'll do her good. Now you shall go, my dear, that's flat."

Lawrence began to wish he had held his tongue. He had his own ends to serve, but, to do him justice, he had not meant to serve them at Laura's expense. But he had still his trump card to play. "Surely we could find a chaperon?" he said gently, ignoring Bernard. "What about the Staffords? Hardly in Val's line, perhaps. But the child—little Miss Isabel—won't she do?"

To his relief, Laura's eyes lit up with pleasure. "Isabel? I never thought of her! Yes, she would love to come!—But, if she does, she must come as my guest. You would never have asked her of your own accord, and the Staffords are so proud, I'm sure Val wouldn't like you to pay for her." Again Bernard's short, sardonic laugh translated the silence of his cousin's constraint and dismay.

"Hark to her! I'll sort her for you, Lawrence. She shall go, and you shall be paymaster. Yes, and for the Stafford brat too. Lawrence and I don't understand these modern manners, my dear. When we take a pretty woman out we like to do the treating. Now cut along and see about the tickets, Lawrence. You can 'phone from the post office."

Lawrence had secured a box ten days ago, but he strolled out, thinking that the husband and wife might understand each other better when alone. As soon as he was out of earshot Bernard turned on Laura and seized her by the wrist, his features altering, their sardonic mask recast in deep lines of hate. "Why wouldn't you go up alone? That's what he wanted. Why have you saddled him with the little Stafford girl? You can't take her to dine in a private room."

"It was because I foresaw this that I refused. Why do you torment yourself by forcing me to go?"

"I? What do I care? Do you think I should shed many tears if you walked out of the house and never came back? Think I don't know he's your lover? you're uncommonly circumspect with your stable door! . . . A woman like you! Look here." He picked up the Persian dagger. "See it? That's been used before. I should like to use it on you. I should like to cut your tongue out with it. Don't be afraid, I'm not going to stab you."

"Afraid?" said his wife with her serene ironical smile. "My dear Bernard, you tempt me to wish you were."

"Oh, not before tonight. Jolly time you'll have tonight, you and Lawrence . . . I can only trust you'll respect the Stafford child's innocence."

"Bernard! Bernard!"

"Don't you Bernard me. You can't take me in. Stop. Where are you off to now?"

"To tell Lawrence not to get the tickets. I shan't go with him."

"You will go with him," said Bernard Clowes, his fingers tightening on her wrist. "Stop here: come closer." He locked his arm round her waist. "Is he your lover yet, Lally? Tell me: I swear I won't kill you if you do. Are you on the borderland of virtue still, or over it?"

"Let me go," said Laura, panting for breath under his clenched grip. "I will not answer such questions. You know you don't mean one word of them. Take care, you're tearing my blouse. Oh, that frightful war! what has it done to you, to turn you from the man I married into what you are?"

"What am I?"

"A madman, or not far off it. End this horrible life: send him away. It's killing me, and as for you, if you were sane enough to understand what you're doing, you would blow your brains out."

"Likely enough," said Bernard Clowes.

He let her go. "Come back to me now, Laura." His wife leant over him, unfaltering, though she had known for some time that she was dealing with the abnormal. "Kiss me." Laura touched his lips. "That's better, old girl. I am a cross-grained devil and I make your life a hell to you, don't I? But don't—don't leave me. Don't chuck me over. Let me have your love to cling to. I don't believe in God, I don't believe in any other man, often enough I don't believe in myself, I feel, I feel unreal . . . ." He stopped, shut his eyes, moved his head on the pillow, and felt about over his rug with the blind groping hands of a delirious, almost of a dying man. Laura gathered them up and held them to her heart. "That's better," said Bernard, his voice gaining strength as he opened his eyes on the beautiful still face bent over him. "Just now and again, in my lucid moments, I do—I do believe in you, old girl. You are just the one thing I have left. You won't forsake me, will you, ever? not whatever I do to you."

"Never, my darling."

"Seems a bit one-sided, that bargain," said Bernard.

He lay perfectly still for a little while, his great hands softly pressed against his wife's firm breast.

"And now get your hat and trot up to the village with Lawrence. Yes, I should like you to go tonight. It'll do you good. Give you a breath of fresh air after your extra dose of sulphur. Yes, you shall take Isabel. Then you'll be safe: I can't insult you if you and Lawrence weren't alone. Now run along, I've had enough emotions. But don't forget. Laura," he spoke thickly and with effort, turning his head away as he pushed her from him "yes, get out, I've had enough of you for the present—but don't forget all the same that you're the one thing on earth that ever is real to me."

Isabel was up a ladder in the orchard picking plums. Waving her hand to Laura and Lawrence Hyde, she called out to them to look the other way while she came down. It must be owned that neither Laura nor Lawrence obeyed her, and they were rewarded, while she felt about for the top rung, with an unimpeded view of two very pretty legs. Lawrence really thought she was going to fall out of the tree, but eventually she came safe to earth, and approached holding out a basket full of glowing fruit. "Though you don't deserve them," she said reproachfully, "because I could feel you looking at me. I did think I should be safe at this hour in the morning!"

"Do I see Val?" said Laura, screwing up her eyes to peer in through the slats of the green jalousies. "I'll go and talk him round, while you break the news to Miss Stafford. Such do's, Isabel! You don't know what dissipations are in store for you, if only Val will say yes." She like every one else elevated Val to the parental dignity vice Mr. Stafford deposed.

"He's come in for some lunch. He'll love to have you watch him eat," said Isabel. "What's it to be, Captain Hyde? A picnic?"

Isabel's imagination had never soared beyond a picnic. When Lawrence unfolded the London scheme her eyes grew round with astonishment and an awed silence fell on her. "Oh, it won't happen," she said, when she had recovered sufficiently to reply at all. "Nothing so angelically wonderful ever would happen to me. I'm perfectly certain Val will say no. Now we've settled that, you can tell me all about it, because of course you and Laura will go in any case."

"But that's precisely what we can't do." Gently and imperceptibly Lawrence impelled her through the rose archway into the kitchen garden, where they were partly sheltered behind the walls of lilacs, a little thinner than they had been in June but still an effective screen. He had not found himself alone with Isabel for ten days. Since Val was with Laura, Lawrence drew the rather cynical conclusion that he could count on a breathing space, and he wondered if Isabel too were glad of it. She was in a brown cotton dress, her right sleeve still tucked up high on her bare arm: a rounded slender arm not much tanned even at the wrist, for her skin was almost impervious to sunburn. Above the elbow it was milk-white with a faint bloom on it, in texture not like ivory, which is a dead, cold, and polished material, but like a flower petal, one of those flowers that have a downy sheen on them, white hyacinths or tall lilies. Lawrence fixed his eyes on it unconsciously but so steadily that Isabel became aware of his admiration. She blushed and was going to pull down her sleeve, but checked herself, and turning a little away, so that she could pretend not to know that he was looking at her, raised her arm to smooth her hair, lifting it and pushing a loosened hairpin into place. After all . . . This was Isabel's first venture into coquetry. But it was half unconscious.

"Why can't you? oh, I suppose people would be silly. Major Clowes himself is silly enough for anything. Oh, I'm so sorry, I always forget he's your cousin! Is that why you want me to go?"

"No."

She laughed. "Never mind, you'll soon find some one else. What play is it?"

"'She Promised to Marry.'"

"Oh ah, yes: that's by Moore, who wrote 'The Milkmaid' and 'Sheddon, M.P.' I've read some of his things. I liked them so, I made Rowsley give me them for my last birthday. They're quite cheap in brown paper. O! dear, I should love to see one of them on the stage!" Isabel gave a great sigh. "A London stage too! I've never been to a theatre except in Salisbury. And Hadow's is the one to go to, isn't it? Where they play the clever plays that aren't tiresome. Who's acting tonight?"

"Madeleine Wild and Peter Sennet."

"Have you ever seen them?"

Lawrence laughed outright. "I was at their wedding. Madeleine is half French: I knew her first when she was singing in a cafe chantant on the Champs Elysees. She is dark and pretty and Peter is fair and pretty, and Peter is the deadliest poker player that ever scored off an American train crook."

"Oh," said Isabel with a second sigh that nearly blew her away, "how I should love to know actors and actresses and people who play poker! It must make Life so intensely interesting!"

Behind her badinage was she half in earnest? Lawrence's eye ranged over the old pale walls of the vicarage, on which the climbing roses were already beginning to redden their leaves: over the lavender borders: over the dry pale turf underfoot and the silver and brown of the Plain, burnt by a hot summer. The fruit that had been green in June was ripe now, and down the Painted-Lady apple-trees fell such a cascade of ruby and coral-coloured apples, from high sprig to heavy bole, that they looked like trees in a Kate Greenaway drawing. But there was no other change. Life at Chilmark flowed on uneventful from day to day. He did not admonish Isabel to be content with it. "Should you like to live in Chelsea?"

Isabel shut her eyes. "I should like fifteen thousand a year and a yacht. Don't tell Jimmy, it would break his heart. He says money is a curse. But he's not much of a judge, dear angel, because he's never had any. What's your opinion—you're rich, aren't you? Has it done you any harm?"

"Oh, I am a fairly decent sort of fellow as men go."

"But would you be a nobler character if you were poor?" Isabel asked, pillowing her round chin on her palm and examining Lawrence apparently in a spirit of scientific enquiry. "Because that is Jimmy's theory, and merely to say that you're noble now doesn't meet the case. Do you do good with your money?"

"No fear! I encourage trade. I've never touched second rate stuff in my life."

"Oh, you are different!" Isabel exclaimed. They had been using words for counters, to mean at once less and more than they said, but under his irony she penetrated to a hard material egoism, as swiftly as he had detected in her the eternal unrest of youth. "Val was right."

"What saith the Gospel according to St. Val?"

"That you were only a bird of passage."

Lawrence waited a moment before replying. "Birds of passage have their mating seasons." Once more Isabel, not knowing what to make of this remark, let it alone. "But I should like to possess Val's good opinion. What have I done to offend him? Can't you give me any tips?"

"It isn't so much what you do as what you are. Val's very, very English."

"But what am I?"

"Foreign," said Isabel simply.

"A Jew? Yes, I knew I should have that prejudice to live down. But I'm not a hall-marked Israelite, am I? After all I'm half English by birth and wholly so by breeding." Isabel was betrayed into an involuntary and fleeting smile. "Hallo! what's this?"

"Oh, Captain Hyde—"

"Go on."

"No: it's the tiniest trifle, and besides I've no right."

"Ask me anything you like, I give you the right."

Isabel blushed. "You must be descended from Jephthah!— O! dear, I didn't mean that!"

"Never mind," said Lawrence, unable to help laughing. "My feelings are not sensitive. But do finish—you fill me with curiosity. What shibboleth do I fail in?"

Faithful are the wounds of a friend. "Englishmen don't wear jewellery," murmured Isabel apologetic.

"Sac a papier!" said Lawrence. "My rings?"

He stretched out his hand, a characteristic hand, strong and flexible, but soft from idleness and white from Gaston's daily attentions: a diamond richly set in a cluster of diamonds and emeralds sparkled on the second finger, and a royal turquoise from Iran, an immense stone the colour of the Mediterranean in April, on the third. "Does Val object to them? Certainly Val is very English. My pocket editions of beauty! That diamond was presented by one of the Rothschilds in gratitude for the help old Hyde-and-seek gave him in getting together his collection of early English watercolours: as for the other, it never ought to have left the Persian treasury, and there'd have been trouble in the royal house if my father had worn it at the Court. Have you ever seen such a blue? On a dull railway journey I can sit and watch those stones by the hour together. But Val would rather read the Daily Mail"

"Every one laughs at them: Jack and Lord Grantchester, and even Jimmy."

"And you?" said Lawrence, taking off the rings:—not visibly nettled, but a trifle regretful.

Isabel knit her brows. "Can a thing be very beautiful and historic, and yet not in good taste?— It can if it's out of harmony: that's what the Greeks never forgot. Men ought not to look effeminate— Oh! O Captain Hyde, don't!"

Lawrence, standing up, had with one powerful smooth drive of the arm sent both rings skimming over the borders, under the apple trees, over the garden wall, to scatter and drop on the open moor. "And here comes Mrs. Clowes, so now I shall learn my fate. I thought Val would not leave us long together.— Well, Val, what is it to be? May the young lady come?"

Isabel also sprang up, changing from woman to child as Lawrence changed from deference to patronage. Their manner to each other when alone was always different from their manner before an audience. But this change, deliberate in Lawrence, had hitherto been instinctive and almost unconscious in Isabel. It was not so now, she fled to Val and to her younger self for refuge. What a fanfaronade! Why couldn't Captain Hyde have put the rings in his pocket? But no, it must all be done with an air—and what an air! Rings worth thousands—historic mementoes—stripped off and tossed away to please—! And at that Isabel, enchanted and terrified, bundled the entire dialogue into the cellars of her mind and locked the doors on it. Later,—later,—when one was alone! "Oh, Val, say I may go!" she cried, clasping her hands on Val's arm, so cool and firm amid a spinning world.

[Footnote]

What actually happened later that afternoon was that Isabel, who had a practical mind, spent three-quarters of an hour on the moor hunting for the rings. The turquoise she found, conspicuous on a patch of smooth turf: the other was never recovered.

[End of Footnote]

"You may," said Val laughing. He disliked the scheme, but was incapable of refusing Laura Clowes: he gave her Isabel as he would have given her the last drops of his blood, if she had asked for them in that low voice of hers, and with those sweet eyes that never seemed to anticipate refusal. There are women—not necessarily the most beautiful of their sex—to whom men find it hard to refuse anything. And, consenting, it was not in Val to consent with an ill grace. "Certainly you may, if Captain Hyde is kind enough to take you!" Stafford's lips, finely cut and sensitive, betrayed the sarcastic sense of humour which he ruled out of his voice: perhaps the less said about kindness the better! "But do look over her wardrobe first, Laura: I'm never sure whether Isabel is grown up or not, but she could hardly figure at Hadow's in her present easy-going kit—"

He stopped, because Isabel was trying to waltz him round the lawn. In her reaction from a deeper excitement, she was as excited as a child. She released Val soon and hugged Laura Clowes instead, while Lawrence, looking on with his wintry smile, wondered whether she would have extended the same civility to him if she had known how much he desired it. . . . There were moments when he hated Isabel. Was she never going to grow up?

Not at present, apparently. "What must I wear, Laura? Do people wear evening dress? Where shall we sit? What time shall we get back? How are you going? What time must I be ready? Will you have dinner before you go or take sandwiches with you?"—how long the patter of questions would have run on it is hard to say, if the extreme naivete of the last one had not drowned them in universal laughter, and Isabel in crimson.

Mrs. Jack Bendish rode up while they were talking, slipped from her saddle, and threw the reins to Val without apology, though she knew there was no one but Val to take the mare to the stable. Yvonne was the only member of the Castle household who presumed on Val's subordinate position. She treated him like a superior servant. When she heard what was in the wind her eyes were as green as a cat's. "How kind of Captain Hyde!" she drawled, as Lawrence, irritated by her manner, went to help Val, while Isabel was called indoors by Fanny to listen to a tale of distress, unravel a grievance, and prescribe for anemia. "Some one ought to warn the child."

"Warn her of what?"

"Has it never struck you that Isabel is a pretty girl and Lawrence a good looking man?"

"But Isabel is too intelligent to have her head turned by the first handsome man she meets!" Yvonne looked as though she found her sister rather hopeless. "Dear, you really must be sensible!" Laura pleaded. "It's not as if poor Lawrence had tried to flirt with her. He never even thought of asking her for tonight till I suggested it!" This was the impression left on Laura's memory. "She isn't the sort of woman to attract him."

"What sort of woman would attract him, I wonder?" said Mrs. Jack, blowing rings of smoke delicately down her thin nostrils.

"Oh, when he marries it will be some one older than Isabel, more sophisticated, more a woman of the world. I like Lawrence immensely, but there is just that in him: he's one of the men who expect their wives to do them credit."

"Some one more like me," suggested Yvonne. "Or you." Her face was a study in untroubled innocence. Laura eyed her rather sharply. "But Lawrence isn't a marrying man. He won't marry till some woman raises the price on him."

"You speak as if between men and women life were always a duel."

"So It is." Laura made a small inarticulate sound of dissent. "Sex is a duel. Don't you know"—an infinitesimal hesitation marked the conscious forcing of a barrier: cynically frank as she was on most points, Mrs. Bendish had always left her sister's married life alone:—"that—that's what's wrong with Bernard? Oh! Laura! Simpleton that you are. . . I'm often frightfully sorry for Bernard. It has thrown him clean off the rails. One can't wonder that he's consumed with jealousy."

In the stillness that followed Yvonne occupied herself with her cigarette. Mrs. Clowes was formidable even to her sister in her delicately inaccessible dignity.

"Had you any special motive in saying this to me now, Yvonne?"

"This theatre business."

"I don't contemplate running away with Lawrence, if that is what you mean."

"Wish you would!" confessed Mrs. Bendish frankly. "Then Bernard could divorce you and you could start fair again. I'm fed up with Bernard. I'm sorry for him, poor devil, but he never was much of a joy as a husband, and he's going from bad to worse. Think I'm blind? Of course he's jealous. High dresses and lace cuffs aren't the fashion now, Lal."

Her sister slowly turned back the frill from her wrist and examined the scarlet stain of Bernard's finger-print. "Does it show so plainly? I hope other people haven't noticed. Bernard doesn't remember how strong his hands still are."

"Doesn't care, you mean."

"Do you want me quite naked?" said Laura. "Well, doesn't care, then."

Yvonne was not accustomed to the smart of pity. She winced under it, and her tongue, an edge-tool of intelligence or passion, but not naturally prone to express tenderness, became more than ever articulate. "Sorry!" she said with difficulty, and then, "Didn't want to rake all this up. But I'm fond of you. We've always been pals, you and I, Lulu."

"Say whatever you like."

"Then—" she sat up, throwing away her cigarette-"I'm going to warn you. All Chilmark believes Lawrence is your lover."

"And do you?"

"No. I know you wouldn't run an intrigue."

"Thank you."

"But Jack and I both think, if you don't want to cut and run with him, you ought to pack him off. Mind, if you do want to, you can count me in, and Jack too. I'm not religious: Jack is, but he's not narrow. As for the social bother of it—marriage is a useful institution and all that, but it's perfectly obvious that one can get—over the rails and back again if one has money. There aren't twenty houses (worth going to) in London that would cut you if you turned up properly remarried to a rich man."

"Are you . . . recommending this course?"

"I'd like you to be happy."

"And what about Bernard?"

"Put in a couple of good trained nurses who wouldn't give him his head as you do, and he'd be a different man by the spring."

"He certainly would," said Laura drily. "He would be dead."

"Not he. He's far too strong to die of being made uncomfortable. As a matter of fact it would do him all the good in the world," pursued Yvonne calmly. "He cries out to be bullied. What's so irritating in the present situation is that though you let him rack you to pieces you never give him what he wants! You don't shine as a wife, my dear."

"It will end in my sending Lawrence away," said Laura with a subdued sigh. "I didn't want to because in many ways he has done Bernard so much good; no one else has ever had the same influence over him; besides, I liked having him at Wanhope for my own sake—he freshened us up and gave us different things to talk about, outside interests, new ideas. And after all, so far as Bernard himself is concerned, one is as good as another. He always has been jealous and always will be. But if all Chilmark credits us with the rather ignominious feat of betraying him, Lawrence will have to go."

"Lawrence may have something to say to that."

"He's not in love with me." Yvonne's eyes widened in genuine scepticism.—"Oh dear, as if I shouldn't know!" Laura broke out petulantly. Might not Yvonne have remembered that, in the days when they were living together in a French appartement, Laura's experience had been pretty nearly as wide as her own? "He is not, I tell you! nor I with him. But, if we were, I shouldn't desert Bernard. I do not believe in your two highly trained nurses. I don't think you much believe in them yourself. They might break him in, because nurses are drilled to deal with tiresome and unmanageable patients, but it would be worse for him, not better. He rebels fiercely enough now, but if I weren't there he would rebel still more fiercely, and all the rage and humiliation would have no outlet. You want me to be happy? We Selincourts are so quick to seize happiness! Father did it . . . and Lucian does it: dear Lulu! We both love him, but it's difficult to be proud of him. Yet he has good qualities, good abilities. He's far cleverer than I am, and so are you," Laura's tone was diffident, "but oh, you are wrong in thinking so much of mere happiness. There is an immense amount of pain in the world, and if one doesn't bear one's own share it falls on some one else. My life with Bernard isn't—always easy," she found a momentary difficulty in controlling her voice, "but he's my husband and I shall stick to him. The more so for being deeply conscious that a different woman might manage him better. No I don't mind your saying it. Oh, how often I've felt the truth of it! But, such as I am, I'm all he has."

"You're a thousand times too good for him. Why are you so good?"

"I'm not good and no more is Lulu." Mrs. Bendish sighed, impressed perhaps by Laura's alien moralities, certainly by her determination. "However, if you won't you won't, and in a way I'm glad, selfishly that is, because of Jack's people. But in that case, dear girl, do get rid of Lawrence! The situation strikes me as fraught with danger. One of those situations where every one says something's sure to happen, and then they're all flabbergasted when it does."

"Bernard is not a formidable enemy," said Mrs. Clowes drily. "But, yes, Lawrence must go. I'll speak to him tomorrow."

"Why not today?"

"It would spoil our evening."

"Give it up."

"And disappoint Isabel?"

"I don't like it."

"Nor I. But I was forced into it, and I can't break my word to Lawrence and the child. After all, there's no great odds between today and tomorrow. What can happen in twenty-four hours?"



CHAPTER XIII

In after life, when Isabel was destined to look back on that day as the last day of her youth, she recalled no part of it more clearly than wandering up to her own room after an early tea to dress, and flinging herself down on her bed instead of dressing. She slept next to Val. But while Val's room, sailor-like in its neatness, was bare as any garret and got no sun at all, Isabel's was comfortable in a shabby way and faced south and west over the garden: an autumn garden now, bathed in westering sunshine, fortified from the valley by a carved gold height of beech trees, open on every other side over sunburnt moorland pale and rough as a stubble-field in its autumn feathering of light brown grasses and seedling flowers aflicker in a west wind. Tonight however Isabel saw nothing of it, she lay as if asleep, her face hidden in her pillow: she, the most active person in the house, who was never tired like Val nor lazy like Rowsley! Conscience pricked her, but she was muffled so thick in happiness that she scarcely felt it: the fancies that floated into her mind frightened her, and yet they were too sweet to banish: and then after all were they wrong?

Always on clear evenings the sun flung a great ray across her wall, turning the faded pale green paper into a liquid gold-green like sunlit water, evoking a dusty gleam from her mirror, and deepening the shadows in an old mezzo tint of Botticelli's Spring which was pinned up where she could gaze at it while she brushed her hair. The room thus illumined was that of a young girl with little time to spare and less money, and an ungrown individual taste not yet critical enough to throw off early loyalties. There were no other pictures, except an engraving of "The Light of the World," given her by Val, who admired it. There was a tall bookcase, the top shelves devoted to Sweet's "Anglo-Saxon Reader," Lanson's "Histoire de la litterature Francaise," and other textbooks that she was reading for her examination in October, the lower a ragged regiment of novels and verse—"The Three Musketeers," "Typhoon," "Many Inventions," Landor's "Hellenics," "with fondest love from Laura," "Une Vie" and "Fort comme la Mort" in yellow and initialled "Y.B." There were also a big table strewn with papers and books, and a chintz covered box-ottoman into which Isabel bundled all those rubbishing treasures that people who love their past can never make up their weak minds to throw away. She examined them all in the stream of gold sunlight as if she had never seen them before. It was time to get up and arrange her hair and change into her lace petticoats. If she did not get up at once she would be late and they would lose their train. And it seemed to her that she would die if they lost their train, that she never could survive such a disappointment: and yet she could not bring herself to get up and give over dreaming.

And what dreams they were, oh! what would Val say to them?—And yet again after all were they so wicked?—They were incredibly naif and innocent, and so dim that within twenty-four hours Isabel was to look back on them as a woman looks back on her childhood. She was not ignorant of the mysteries of birth and death. She had lived all her life among the poor, and knew many things which are not included in school curricula, such as the gentle art of keeping children's hair clean, how to divide a four-roomed cottage between a man and wife and six children and a lodger, and what to say when shown "a beautiful corpse": but she had never had a lover of her own. There were no marriageable men in Chilmark—there never are in an English village—and she was too young for Rowsley's brother officers, or they were too young for her. She had dreamed of fairy princes (blases-men-of-the-world, mostly in the Guards or the diplomatic service), but it was never precisely Isabel Stafford whom they clasped to their hearts—no, it was LaSignora Isabella, the star of Covent Garden, or the Lady Isabel de Stafford, a Duke's daughter in disguise. And Lawrence came to her in the mantle of these patrician ghosts.

But—and at this point Isabel hid her face on her arm—he was no ghost: he knew what he wanted and he meant to have it: and it was a far cry from visionary Heroes to Lawrence Hyde in the flesh, son of a Jew, smelling of cigar-smoke, and taking hold of her with his large, fair, overmanicured hands. A far cry even from Val or Jack Bendish: from the cool, mannered Englishman to the hot Oriental blood. When people were engaged they often kissed each other . . . but when it came to imagining oneself . . . one's head against that thick tweed . . . no . . . it must be one of the things that are safe to do but dangerous to dream of doing. Oh, never, never!—But she had been trained in sincerity: and was this cry sincere? Her mind was chaos.

And yet after all why dangerous? Even Laura, Val's adored Laura, had been engaged twice before she married Major Clowes: as for Yvonne, Isabel felt sure she had been kissed many times, and not by Jack Bendish only. Such things happen, then! in real life, not only in books. As for the cigars and the valet . . . and Val's warnings . . . one can't have all one wants in this world! It contains no ideal heroes: what was it Yvonne had once said? "Every marriage is either a delusion or a compromise." And Isabel had shortcomings enough of her own: she was irritable, lazy, selfish: read novels when she ought to have been at her lessons: left household jobs undone in the certainty that Val, however tired he was, would do them for her: small sins, but then her temptations were small! Take it by and large, she was probably no better than Captain Hyde except for want of opportunity. And how he would laugh if he heard her say so!

She liked him for laughing. She had been brought up in an atmosphere of scruple. Her father overworked his conscience, treating a question of taste as a moral issue, and drawing no line between great and small—like the man who gave a penny to a beggar and implored him not to spend it on debauchery. Charity and a sense of fun saved Val, but if more lenient to others he was ruthlessly stern to himself. Lawrence blew on Isabel like a breath of sea air. In her reaction she liked his external characteristics, his manner to servants, his expensive clothes and boots, all the signs of money spent freely on himself.

She even liked his politics. Isabel had been brought up all her life to talk politics. Mr. Stafford was a Christian Socialist, a creed which in her private opinion was nicely calculated to produce the maximum of human discomfort: and from a conversation between Hyde and Jack Bendish she had learnt that Hyde was all of her own view. There was no nonsense about him—none of that sweet blind altruism which, as Isabel saw it, only made the altruist and his family so bitterly uncomfortable without doing any good to the poor. The poor? She knew intuitively that servants and porters and waiters would far rather serve Hyde than her father. Mr. Stafford longed to uplift the working classes, but Isabel had never got herself thoroughly convinced that they stood in need of uplifting. Her practical common sense rose in arms against Movements that tried to get them to go to picture galleries instead of picture palaces. Why shouldn't they do as they liked? Does one reform one's friends? Captain Hyde would live and let live.

And he was rich. Few girls as cramped as Isabel could have remained blind to that wide horizon, and she made no pretence of doing so: she was honest with herself and owned that she had always longed to be rich. No one could call her discontented! her happy sunny temper took life as it came and enjoyed every minute of it, but her tastes were not really simple, though Val thought they were. She had long felt a clear though perfectly good-humoured and philosophic impatience of her narrow scope. Hyde could give her all and more than all she had ever desired— foreign countries and fine clothes, books and paintings, and power apparently and the admiration of men . . . Isabel Hyde . . . Mrs. Lawrence Hyde . . . .smiling she tried his name under her breath . . .and suddenly she found herself standing before the mirror, examining her face in its dusky shallows and asking of it the question that has perplexed many a young girl as beautiful as she—"Am I pretty?" She pulled the pins out of her hair and ran a comb through it till it fell this way and that like an Indian veil, darkly burnished and sunset-shot with threads of bronze. "Lawrence has never seen it loose," she reflected: "surely I am rather pretty?" and then "Oh, oh, I shall be late!" and Isabel's dreams were drenched and scattered under the shock of cold water.

Dreamlike the run through the warm September landscape: dreamlike the slip of country platform, where, while Lawrence took their tickets, she and Laura walked up and down and fingered the tall hollyhocks flowering upward in quilled rosettes of lemon-yellow and coral red, like paper lanterns lit by a fairy lamplighter on a spiral stair: and most dreamlike of all the discovery that the Exeter express had been flagged for them and that she was expected to precede Laura into a reserved first class carriage. It was not more than once or twice in a year that Isabel went by train, and she had never travelled but third class in her life. How smoothly life runs for those who have great possessions! How polite the railway staff were! The station master himself held open the door for the Wanhope party. Now she knew Mr. Chivers very well, but in all previous intercourse one finger to his cap had been enough for young Miss Isabel. Certainly it was agreeable, this hothouse atmosphere. "Shall you feel cold?" Lawrence asked, and Isabel, murmuring "No, thank you," blushed in response to the touch of formality in his manner. She felt what women often feel in the early stages of a love affair, that he had been nearer to her when he was not there, than now when they were together in the presence of a third person. She had grown shy and strange before this careless composed man lounging opposite her with his light overcoat thrown open and his crush hat on his knees, conventionally polite, his long legs stretched out sideways to give her and Laura plenty of room.

And Lawrence on the journey neither spoke to her nor watched her, though Isabel shone in borrowed plumes. There had been no time to buy clothes, and so Val, though grudgingly, had allowed Laura and Yvonne to ransack their shelves and presses for Cinderella's adornment. But one glance had painted her portrait for him, tall and slender in a long sealskin coat of Yvonne's which was rulled and collared and flounced with fur, her glossy hair parted on one side and drawn back into what she called a soup-plate of plaits. Once only he directly addressed her, when Laura loosened her own sables. "Do undo your coat, won't you? It's hot tonight for September."

"I'm not hot, thank you," said Isabel stiffly: but slowly, as if against her will, she opened the collar of her coat and pushed it back from her young neck and the crossed folds of her lace gown. The gown was very old, it had indeed belonged to Laura Selincourt: it was because Laura loved its soft, graceful, dateless lines that it had survived so long. She had seized on it with her unerring tact: this was right for Isabel, this dim transparency of rosepoint modelling itself over the immature slenderness of nineteen: and she and her maid Catherine and Mrs. Bendish had spent patient hours trying it on and modifying it to suit the fashion of the day. Laura had refused to impose upon Isabel either her own modish elegance or Yvonne's effect of the arresting and bizarre. "Isn't she almost too slight for it?" Yvonne had asked, and Laura for all answer had hummed a little French song—

'Mignonne allons voir si la rose Qui ce matin avoit desclose Sa robe de pourpre au soleil A point perdu ceste vespree I as plis de sa robe pourpree Et son teint au votre pareil . . .'

She discerned in Isabel that quality of beauty, noble, spirited, and yet wistful, which requires a most expensive setting of simplicity. And that was why Isabel opened her coat. If Captain Hyde had admired her in her Chilmark muslin, what would he think of flounce and fold of rose-point of Alencon under Yvonne's perfumed furs? And then she blushed again because the yearning in his eyes made her wonder if he cared after all whether she wore lace or cotton. Everything was so strange!

Strangest of all it was, to the brink of unreality, that Laura evidently remained blind. But Laura was always blind. "Why, she never even sees Val!" reflected Isabel scornfully. And yet— suppose Isabel were deceiving herself? What if Captain Hyde were not in earnest? But her older self comforted her child's self: careless was he, and composed? "You were not always so composed, Lawrence," in her own mind the elder Isabel mocked him with her sparkling eyes.

Waterloo, lamplit and resonant: the pulsing of many lamps, the hurry of many steps, the flitting by of many faces under an arch of gloom: dark quiet and the scent of violets in a waiting car.

"What a jolly taxi!" Isabel exclaimed. "I never was in a taxi like this before. Is it a more expensive kind?"

"My dear Lawrence, you certainly have the art of making your life run on wheels!" said Laura smiling. "How many telegrams have you sent today?"

"If you do a thing at all you may as well do it in decent comfort," Lawrence replied sententiously. "Half past seven; that'll give us easy time! I booked a table at Malvani's, I thought you would prefer it to one of the big crowded shows."

"Are we going to have supper—dinner I mean—at a restaurant?" asked Isabel awestruck.

Laurance smiled at her with irrepressible tenderness. "Did you think you weren't going to get anything to eat at all?" He forbore to remind her of her unfortunate allusion to sandwiches— for which Isabel was grateful to him. "Aren't you hungry?"

"Oh yes: but then I often am. Is Malvani's a very quiet place?"

Lawrence looked at Laura with a comical expression. "What an ass I was! Wouldn't the Ritz have been more to the point?"

"Never mind, sweetheart," said Laura. "Malvani's isn't dowdily quiet. It's the smartest of the smart, and there are always a lot of distinguished people in it. Dear me, how long it is since I've dined in town! Really it's great fun, I feel as if I had come out of a tomb—" she checked herself: but she might have been as indiscreet as she liked, for her companions were not listening. Laura was faintly, very faintly startled by their attitude—Hyde leaning forward in the half-light of the brougham to button Isabel's glove—but she was soon smiling at her own fancy. "Poor Isabel, poor simple Isabel!" She was only a child after all.

A child, but a very gay and winning child, when she came into Malvani's with her long swaying step, direct glance, and joyous mouth. A spirit of excitement sparkled in Isabel tonight, and every movement was a separate and conscious pleasure to her: the physical sensation of walking delicately, the ripple of her skirt over her ankles, the poise of her shoulders under their transparent veil. . . . Laura saw a dozen men turn to look after the Wanhope party, and took no credit for it, though not long ago she had been accustomed to be watched when she moved through a public room. But now she was better pleased to see Isabel admired than to be admired herself.

As they neared their reserved table a man who had been sitting at it rose with an amused smile. "Have you forgotten who I am, Laura?"

"One might as well be even numbers," Lawrence explained. "So, as I knew Selincourt was in town, I wired to him to join us."

A worn, fatigued-looking, but not ungentle rake of forty, Selincourt had stayed once at Wanhope, but the visit had not been a success: indeed Laura had been thankful when it ended before host and guest threw the decanters at each other's heads. That she was pleased to see him now there could be no doubt: she had taken him by both hands and was smiling at him as if she would have liked to fling decorum to the winds and kiss him. Lawrence also smiled but with a touch of finesse. His plan was working. Laura was going to enjoy herself: bon! he was truly fond of Laura and delighted to give her pleasure. But by it he would be left free to devote himself to Isabel.

It was to this end that he had planned the entire expedition. At Chilmark they met continually in the same setting, and he had no means of printing a fresh image of himself on her mind, but here he was free of country customs, a rich man among his equals, an expert in the art of "doing oneself well"—one of those who rule over modern civilization by divine right of a chequebook and a trained manner. Isabel had been brought up by High Churchmen, had she? Let them test what hold they had of her! Every aspect of their journey and of the supper-table at Malvani's, with its heady music and smell of rich food and wines, had been calculated to produce a certain effect—an intoxication of excitement and pleasure. And he set himself to stamp his own impression on Isabel, naming to her, in his soft, isolating undertones, the notable men and women in the room, describing their careers, their finances, even their scandals—it amused him to watch her repress a start. It amused him still more to stand up and shake hands when the immense body and Hebraic nose of an international financier went by with two great ladies and a cabinet minister in tow. "One of my countrymen," Hyde turned to Isabel with a mocking smile. "I am a citizen of no mean city. Those—" with an imperceptible jerk of the head—"would lick the dust off his boots to find out what line the Jew bankers mean to take in the Syrian question. They might as well lick mine."

"Why, do you know?" breathed Isabel.

"Verily, O Gentile maiden." Lawrence grinned at her over his champagne. "I lunched Raphael last time I was in town and he told me all about it. But I shouldn't tell them. It isn't good for Gentiles to know too much about Weltpotitik. That's our show." He leant back in his chair and his hot eyes challenged her to call him a dirty Jew.

Selincourt caught his last remark and looked him up and down with a twinkling glance. He no longer wondered why Lawrence had spent his summer in the tents of Kedar—so differently do brothers look on their own and other men's sisters. But he knew men and things pretty well, and at a moment when Laura was speaking to Isabel he looked straight at Lawrence and touched his glass with a murmured, "Go slow, old man." The elder man had seen instantly what neither Mrs. Clowes nor Isabel had any notion of, that under his easy manner Hyde's nerves were all on edge. Lawrence started and stared at him, half offended: but after a moment his good sense extorted a grudging "Thanks." It warned him to be grateful for the hint, and he took it: a second glass of champagne that night would infallibly have gone to his head.

A darkened theatre, fantastically decorated in scarlet and silver: a French orchestra already playing a delicate prelude: a lively audience—a typical "Moor" audience—agreeably ready to be piqued and scandalized as well as amused.

All the plays Isabel had ever seen were Salisbury matinees of "As You Like It" and "Julius Caesar." It was not by chance that Hyde introduced her tonight to this filigree comedy, so cynical under its glittering dialogue. He could find no swifter way to present to her le monde ou l'on s'amuse in all its refined and defiant charm. He liked to watch her laugh, he laughed himself and gave a languid clap or two when Madeleine Wild made one of her famous entries, but his main interest was in his plan of campaign.

Yet chance can never he counted out. When the lights went up after the first act Lawrence found himself looking directly across the rather small and narrow proscenium at a lady in the opposite box. Who the devil was it?—The devil, with a vengeance! It was Mrs. Cleve.



CHAPTER XIV

Conscious to his fingertips that Selincourt was watching him with an amused smile, Lawrence returned Mrs. Cleve's nod with less than his usual ease. Her eye ranged on from Selincourt, to whom she waved a butterfly salute, over the rather faded elegance of Laura Clowes and the extremely youthful charms of Isabel: apparently she did not admire Lawrence's ladies: she spoke to her cavalier, an elderly, foreign-looking man with a copper complexion and curly dark hair, and they laughed together. What ensued between them was not difficult to follow. She made him a request, he rolled plaintive eyeballs at her, the lady carried her point, the gentleman left the box. Then—one saw it coming—she leaned forward till the diamonds in her plenitude of fair hair sparkled like a crown of flame, and beckoned Lawrence to join her.

He cursed her impertinence. Apart from leaving Isabel, he did not want to talk to Mrs. Cleve: he had forgotten her existence, and it was a shock to him to meet her again. Good heavens, had he ever admired her? That white blanc-mange of a woman in her ruby-red French gown, cut open lower than one of Yvonne's without the saying of Yvonne's wiry slimness? Remembering the summerhouse at Bingley Lawrence blushed with shame, not for his morals but for his taste: he was thankful to have gone no further and wondered why he had gone so far.—He had not yet realized that during three months among women of a different stamp his taste had imperceptibly modified itself from day to day.

But she had been his hostess. Impossible to refuse: and with a vexed word of apology to Laura he went out. "Dear me, what an opulent lady!" said Laura with lifted eyebrows. "Who's your friend, Lulu?"

Lucian drily named her. "Queen's Gate, and Sundays at the Metropole. They're shipping people, which is where the diamond ta-ra-ras come from. Oh yes, there's a husband, quite a nice fellow, crocked in the Flying Corps. No, I don't know who the chap is she's got with her. Some dusky brother. Not Cleve." He fell silent as Lawrence appeared in the opposite box.

It was an odd scene to watch in dumbshow. Mrs. Cleve shook hands, and Lawrence was held for more than the conventional moment. He remained standing till she pointed to her cavalier's empty chair: then dropped into it, but sat forward leaning his aim along the balcony, while she, drawn back behind her curtain, was almost drowned in shadow except for an occasional flash of diamonds, or an opaque gleam of white and dimpled neck. An interlude entirely decorous, and yet, so crude was the force of Philippa's personality, one would have had to be very young, or very innocent, to overlook her drift.

"Well, my darling," said Laura, "and what do you think of Madeleine Wild?" She did not wish Isabel to watch Mrs. Cleve. "Is she as nice as your Salisbury Rosalind?"

"Angelical!" said Isabel. "And isn't it luck for me, Royalty coming tonight? I've never seen any one Royal before. It's one of those evenings when nothing goes wrong."

Was not Isabel a trifle too guileless for this wicked world? She prattled on, Selincourt and Laura lending an indulgent ear, Selincourt, like any other man of his type, touched by her innocence, Laura faintly irritated: and meanwhile Isabel through her black lashes watched, not the Duchess of Cumberland's rubies, but those two in the opposite box. Between it and her stretched a beautiful woodland drop-scene, the glitter of the stalls, and the murmur of violins humming through the rising flames of the Feuerzauber . . . presently the Fire Charm eddied away and the lights went down, yet still Lawrence sat on though the interval was over. Across the semi-dark of a "Courtyard by Moonlight" it was hard to distinguish anything but the silhouette of his hand and arm, and Mrs. Cleve's fair hair and immense jewelled fan. What were they saying to each other in this public isolation where anything might be said so long as decorum was preserved?

Selincourt gave a little laugh as the curtain rose. "An old flame," he whispered to Laura, not dreaming that Isabel would understand even if she heard.

"What's an old flame?" asked Isabel, examining him with her brilliant eyes.

"Feuerzauber," said Selincourt readily. "It means fire spell. It's often played between the acts."

"Lucian, Lucian!" said his sister laughing.

"I don't know much about music," said Isabel. "Was it well played?"

"Ah! I know a lot about music," said Selincourt, looking at her very kindly. "No, it was rottenly played. But some fellers can't tell a good tune from a bad one."

Lawrence did not return till the middle of the third act, and offered no apology. He looked fierce and jaded and his eyes were strained. "Past eleven," he said, hurrying Laura into her coat while the orchestra played through the National Anthem, for which Selincourt stood stiffly to attention. "No time for supper, our train goes at 11:59, I hate first nights, the waits between the acts are so infernally long." Laura's eyebrows, faintly arched, hinted at derision. "Oh, it dragged," said Lawrence impatiently. "Let's get out of this."

It was a clear autumn night: the air was mild, and stars were burning overhead almost as brightly as the lamps in Shaftesbury Avenue. What a chase of lamps, high and low, like fireflies in a wood: green as grass, red as blood, or yellow as a naked flame! What a sombre city, and what a fleeting crowd! Isabel had never seen midnight London before. Coming out into the hurrying street roofed with stars, she was seized by an impression of a solitude lonelier than any desert, and dark, like the terror of an eerie sunset or a dry storm on the moor.

"These taxis are waiting for us," Lawrence had come up behind her and his hand was on her arm. "Will you bring your sister, Selincourt?— Miss Isabel, will you come with me?"

"Oh but—!" said Laura, startled. She was responsible to Val for Isabel, and she was not sure that either Val or Isabel would welcome this arrangement.

"Thank you," said Isabel, obediently getting into the second cab.

"Better come, dear," said Selincourt with a shrug, and Laura yielded, for it would have been tiresome to make Isabel get out again, and after all what signified a twenty minutes' run? Yet after the Cleve incident she did not quite like it. Nor did Selincourt; Hyde's overbearing manner set his teeth on edge; but the gentle Lucian would sooner have faced a loaded rifle than a dispute. He agreed with Laura, however, that her fair Arcadian was a trifle too innocent for her years.

Alone with Isabel, Lawrence took off his hat and ran his fingers through his thick fair hair, so thick that it might have been grey, while the deep lines round his mouth began to soften as though fatigue and irritation were being wiped away. "Thank heaven that's over."

"I've enjoyed every minute of it," said Isabel smiling. "Thank you, Captain Hyde, for giving me such a delightful treat! If I weren't sleepy I should like to begin again."

"Oh, don't get sleepy yet," said Lawrence. He pulled up the fur collar of her coat and buttoned it under her chin. "I can't have you catching cold, or what will Val say? You aren't used to driving about in evening dress and we've a long run before us. And how I have been longing for it all the evening, haven't you? I didn't know how to sit through that confounded play. Yes, you can take in Selincourt and Laura but you can't take me in. I know you must have hated it as much as I did. But it's all right now." Sitting sideways with one knee crossed over the other, his face turned towards Isabel, without warning he put his arm round her waist. He had determined not to ask her to marry him till he was sure of her answer, but he was sure of it now, intuitively sure of it . . . the truth being that under his impassive manner impulse was driving him along like a leaf in the wind. "I love you, Isabel, and you love me. Don't deny it."

"Don't do that," said Isabel: "don't hold me."

"Why not? no one can see us."

"Take your arm away. I won't have you hold me. No, Captain Hyde, I will not. I am not Mrs. Cleve."

"Isabel!" said Lawrence, turning grey under his bronze.

"O! I oughtn't to have said that," Isabel murmured. She hid her face in her hands. "Oh Val— I wish Val were here!"

"My darling," they were among the dark streets now that border the river, and he leant forward making no effort to conceal his tenderness, "what is there you can't say to me or I to you? You're so strange, my Isabel, a child one minute and a woman the next, I never know where to have you, but I love the woman more than the child, and there's nothing on earth you need be ashamed to ask me. Naturally you want to be sure. . . . But there was nothing in it except that I hated leaving you, there never has been; I can't discuss it, but there's no tie, no—do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Then, dearest darling of the world, what are you crying for?"

"I'm not crying." She tried to face him, but he was too old for her, and mingling in his love she discerned indulgence, the seasoned judgment and the fixed view. Struggling in imperfect apprehensions of life, she was not yet master of her forces— they came near to mastering her. In his eyes it was natural for her to be jealous. But she was not jealous. That passion can hardly coexist with such sincere and cool contempt as she had felt for Mrs. Cleve. What had pierced her heart and killed her childhood in her was terror lest Lawrence should turn out to have lowered himself to the same level. She knew now that she loved him, and too much to care whether he was Saxon or Jew or rich or poor, but he must—he must be what in her child's vocabulary she called "good," or if not that he must at least see good and bad with clear eyes: sins one can pardon, but the idea of any essential inferiority of taste was torture to her. And meanwhile Lawrence wide of the mark began to coax her. . "My own," his arm stole inside her coat again, "there's nothing to get so red about! Come, you do like me—confess now—you like me better than Val?"

"No, no," Isabel murmured, and slowly, though she had not strength to free herself, she turned her head away. "If you kiss me now I never shall forgive you."

"I won't, but why are you so shy? My Isabel, what is there to be afraid of?"

"You," Isabel sighed out. He was gratified, and betrayed it. "No, Lawrence, you misunderstand. I am not—not shy of you . . ." Under his mocking eyes she gave it up and tried again. "Well, I am, but if that were all I shouldn't refuse . . . I should like you to be happy. Oh! yes, I love you, and I'd so far rather not fight, I'd rather—" she waited a moment like a swimmer on the sand's edge, but his deep need of her carried her away and with a little sigh she flung herself into the open sea—"let you kiss me, because I don't want anything so much as to make you happy, and I believe you would be, and besides I—I should like it myself. But I must know more. I must know the truth. She—Mrs. Cleve—"

"I've already given you my word: do you think I would lie to you?"

"No, I don't; they say men do, but I'm sure you wouldn't. I don't believe you ever would deceive me. But there have been other women, haven't there, since your wife left you?" Lawrence assented briefly. At that moment he would have liked to see Mrs. Cleve hanged and drawn and quartered. "Other women who were— who—with whom—"

"Must you distress yourself like this? Wouldn't it do if I promised to lay my record before Val, and let him be judge?"

"Would you do that?"

"If you wish it."

"Wouldn't you hate it?"

Lawrence smiled.

"And I should hate it for you,", said Isabel. "No: no one can judge you for me and no one shall try. I know you better than Val ever would. No, if you're to be humiliated it shall be before me and me only." She brought the colour into his face. "There have been others, Lawrence?"

"My dear, I've lived the life of other men."

"Do all men live so?"

"Pretty well all."

"Does Val?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "His facilities are limited!"

"He did once—might again?"

"Couldn't we confine the issue to ourselves?"

"Are you afraid of my misjudging Val? I never should: my dearest darling Val is a fixed standard for me, and nothing could alter the way I think of him."

"Don't challenge luck," Lawrence muttered.

"I'm not, it's true. I'm surer of Val than I am of myself, or you, or the sun's rising tomorrow. All I want is to cheek you by him."

"Val is genuinely religious and a bit of an ascetic. I have no doubt that his life is now and will continue to be spotless. But that it was always so is most unlikely. Army subalterns during the war were given no end of a good time. And quite right too, it was the least that could be done for us: and the most, in nine cases out of ten: personally I had no use for munition workers in mud-coloured overalls, but I still remember with gratitude the nymphs who decorated my week end leaves."

Isabel shivered: the hand that he was holding had grown icy cold.

"There, you see!" said Hyde with his saddened cynicism. "You will have it all out but you can't stand it when it comes. You had better have left it to Val: not but what I'd rather talk to you, but I hate to distress you, and you're not old enough yet, my darling, to see these trivial things—yes, trivial to nine-tenths of the world: it's only the clergy, and unmarried women, and a small number of hyper-sensitives like Val, who attach an importance to them that they don't deserve. But you're too young to see them in perspective. Try to do it for my sake. Try to see me as I am."

"Well, show me then."

But what he showed her was not himself but the aspect of himself that he wished her to see—a very different matter. "I'm too old for you. I'm the son of a Jew, and a Houndsditch Jew at that. But I'm rich—what's called rich in my set—and when I marry I shan't keep my wife dependent on me. Ah! don't misunderstand me—yours is a rich manysided nature, and you're too intelligent to underrate the value of money. It means a wide life and lots of interests, books, pictures, music, travel, mixing with the men and women best worth knowing. You're ambitious, my dear, and as my wife you can build yourself up any social position you like. Farringay's not as big as Wharton, but on my soul it's more perfect in its way. I've never seen such panelling in my life, and the gardens are admittedly the most beautiful in Dorsetshire. There are Sevres services more precious than gold plate, and if you come to that there's gold plate into the bargain. Can't I see you there as chatelaine, entertaining the county! You'll wear the sapphires my mother wore; the old man couldn't have been more happily inspired, they're the very colour of your eyes. And there'll be no price to pay, for since I'm a Jew and a cosmopolitan, and not a country squire, you'll keep your personal freedom inviolate. You'll give what you will, when you will, as you will. Any other terms are to my mind unthinkable—a brutalizing of what ought to be the most delicate of things. Heavens, how I hate a middleclass English marriage! Ah! but I'm not so accommodating as I sound, for you won't be a grudging giver; you're not an ascetic like Val, there's passion in you though you've been trained to repress it, you'll soon learn what love means as we understand it in the sunny countries. . . . Isabel, my Isabel, when we get away from these grey English skies you won't refuse to let me kiss you. . ."

Isabel had ceased to listen. Without her own will a scene had sprung up before her eyes: an imaginary scene, like one of those romantic adventures that she had invented a thousand times before—but this was not romantic nor was she precisely the heroine. A foreign hotel with long corridors and many rooms: a door thoughtlessly left ajar: and through it a glimpse of Lawrence—her husband—holding another woman in his arms. It was lifelike, she could have counted the buds embroidered on the girl's blouse, their rose-pink reflected in the hot flush on Hyde's cheek and the glow in his eyes as he stooped over her. And then the imaginary Isabel with a pain at her heart like the stab of a knife, and a smile of inexpressible self-contempt on her lips, noiselessly closed the door so that no one else might see what she had seen, and left him. . . . It would all happen one day, if not that way, some other way; and he would come to her by and by without explanation—she was convinced that he would not lie to her—smiling, the hot glow still on his face, a subdued air of well-being diffused over him from head to foot—and then? The vision faded; her clairvoyance, which had already carried her far beyond her experience, broke down in sheer anguish. But reason took it up and told her that she would speak to him, and that he would apologize and she would forgive him—and that it would all happen again the next time temptation met him in a weak hour.

Faithful? it was not in him to be faithful: with so much that was generous and gallant, there was this vice of taste in him which had offended her that first morning on the moor and again at night in Laura's garden, and which now led him to make love to her when she was under his protection and while the scent of Mrs. Cleve's flowers still clung to his coat. And what love! if he had simply spoken to her out of his need of her, one would not have known how to resist, but it was he who was to be the giver, and what he offered was the measure of what he desired—a lesson in passion and a liberal allowance. . . .

"O no, no, no, I can't!" Isabel cried out, turning from him. "Yes, I love you, but I don't trust you, and I won't marry you. I'm too much afraid."

"Afraid of me?"

"Afraid of the pain."

"What pain?"

"And the—wickedness of it." Lawrence, frozen with astonishment—he had foreseen resistance, but not of this quality—let fall her hand. "Yes, we'll part now. We can part now. I love you, but not too much to get over it in a year or so; and you? you'll forget sooner, because I'm not worth remembering."

"Forget you?"

"Oh! yes, it's not as if you really cared for me; you wouldn't talk to me of money if you did. But I suppose you've known so many. . . . Val warned me long ago that you had not a good name with women."

"Val said that? Val!"

"And now you're angry with Val; I repeat what I oughtn't to repeat, and make mischief. Lawrence, this isn't Val's doing; it isn't even Mrs. Cleve's: it's my own cowardice. I daren't marry you."

"But why not?"

"You're not trying to be good."

"The language of the nursery defeats me, Isabel."

She flushed. "That means I've hurt you."

"Naturally."

"I can't help it." That was truer than he realized, for she could hardly help crying. She could not soften her refusal, because she was so shaken and exhausted by the strain of it that she dared not venture on more than one sentence at a time.

"I'm very sorry."

"But as my wife you could be as 'good' as you liked?"

"You would not leave me strength for it."

"I should corrupt you?"

"Yes, I think you would deliberately tempt me. . . . I think you have tonight."

"Do you care for no one but yourself?" he flung at her in his vertigo of humiliation and anger.

"No: I care for God."

"For God!" Lawrence repeated stupidly: "what has that to do with your marrying me?"

He heard his own betise as it left his lips, and felt the immeasurable depth of it, but he had not time to retract before every personal consideration was wiped from his mind by a cry from Isabel in a very different accent—"Lawrence! oh! look at the time!"

She pointed to the dial of an illuminated clock, hanging high in the soft September night. It was eight minutes to twelve. "What time did you say our train went?"

They were in Whitehall. Lawrence caught up the speaking tube. "Waterloo main entrance—and drive like the devil, please, we're late."

"I thought we had plenty of time?"

"So we had: so much so that I told the man to drive round and round for a bit."

"And have we still time?"

"No."

"We shan't lose the train?"

"Unless it's delayed in starting, which isn't likely."

"Will the others go on and leave us?"

"Hardly!"

"You don't mean that Laura won't get home till tomorrow? Oh!"

"No. But don't look so frightened, no one will blame you—the responsibility is mine entirely."

Isabel's lip curled. It was for Laura that she felt afraid and not for herself, and surely he might have guessed as much as that! "Did you do it on purpose?"

"No."

"I beg your pardon. That was stupid of me."

"Very," said Lawrence with his keen sarcastic smile.

At Waterloo he sprang out, tossed a sovereign to the driver, and made Isabel catch up her skirts and run like a deer. But before they reached the platform it was after twelve and the rails beyond were empty. Selincourt and Laura were waiting by the barrier, Selincourt red with impatience, Laura very pale.