CHAPTER VI CHAPTER VI And that evening Val Stafford came to pay his respects to his old comrade in arms. Lawrence had travelled so much that it never took him long to settle down. Even at Wanhope he managed within a few hours to make himself at home. A trap sent over to Countisford brought back his manservant and an effeminate quantity of luggage, and by teatime his room was strewn from end to end with a litter of expensive trifles more proper to a pretty woman than to a man. Mrs. Clowes, slipping in to cast a housewifely glance to his comfort, held up her hands in mock dismay. "You must give yourself plenty of time to dust all this tomorrow morning, Caroline," she said to the house-maid. She laughed at the gold brushes and gold manicure set, the polished array of boots, the fine silk and linen laid out on his bed, the perfume of sandalwood and Russian leather and eau de cologne. "And I hope you will be able to make Captain Hyde's valet comfortable. Did he say whether he liked his room?" "I reelly don't know, ma'am," replied the truthful Caroline. "You see he's a foreigner, and most of what he says, well, it reelly sounds like swearing. "Madame." It was Gaston himself, appearing from nowhere at Laura's elbow, and saluting her with an empressement that was due, if Laura had only known it, to the harmony of her flounces. Laura eyed the little Gaston kindly. "You are of the South, are you not?" she said in her soft French, the French of a Frenchwoman but for a slight stiffness of disuse: "and are you comfortable here, Gaston? You must tell me if there is anything you want." Gaston was grateful less for her solicitude than for the sound of his own language. When she had left the room he caught up a photograph, thrust it back into his master's dressingcase, and spat through the open window—"C'est fini avec toi, vieille biche," said he: "allons donc! j'aime mieux celle-ci par exemple." But, though Laura laughed, it was with indulgence. While Isabel and Lawrence were conversing among the juniper bushes, the Bendishes had given Mrs. Clowes a sketch of Hyde which had confirmed her own impressions. Although he liked good food and wine and cigars, he liked sport and travel too, and music and painting and books. His eighty-guinea breechloaders were dearer to him than the lady of the ivory frame. Who was the lady of the ivory frame? Gaston would have been happy to define with the leer of the boulevards the relations between his master and Philippa Cleve. Gaston had no doubt of them, nor had Frederick Cleve; Philippa had high hopes; Lawrence alone hung fire. If he continued to meet her and she to offer him lavish opportunities the situation might develop, for Lawrence was not sufficiently in earnest in any direction to play what has been called the ill-favoured part of a Joseph, but in his heart of hearts, this Joseph wished Potiphar would keep his wife in order. And, strange to say, Yvonne was not far wide of the mark. She believed that Joseph was a sinner but not a willing one: and Jack Bendish, a little astray among these feminine subtleties, assented after his fashion—"Hyde's rather an ass in some ways," he said simply, "but he's an all-round sportsman." Thus primed, Laura was able to draw out her guest, and dinner passed off gaily, for Bernard Clowes was no dog in the manger, and listened with sparkling eyes to adventures that ranged from Atlantic sailing in a thirty-ton yacht to a Nigerian rhinoceros shoot. Nor was Lawrence the focus of the lime-light-he was unaffectedly modest; but when, in expatiating on a favourite rifle, he confessed to having held fire till a charging rhinoceros bull was within eight and twenty yards of him, Bernard could supply the footnotes for himself. "I knew she wouldn't let me down," said Lawrence apologetically. "Ah! she was a bonnie thing, that old gun of mine. Ever shoot with a cordite rifle?" Bernard shook his head. "I'd like you to see my guns," Lawrence continued, too shrewd to be tactful. "I'll have them sent down, shall I? Or Gaston shall run up and fetch 'em. He loves a day in town." Under this bracing treatment Bernard became more natural than Laura had seen him for a long time, and he stayed in the drawingroom after dinner, chatting with Lawrence and listening to his wife at the piano, till Laura thought the Golden Age had come again. How long would it last? Philosophers like Laura never ask that question. At all events it lasted till half past nine, when the sick man was honestly tired and the lines of no fictitious pain were drawn deep about his mouth and eyes. Mrs. Clowes went away with her husband, who liked to have her at hand while Barry was getting him to bed, and Lawrence had strolled out on the lawn, when a shutter was thrown down in Bernard's room and Laura reappeared at the open window. "Lawrence, are you there?" she asked, shading her eyes between her hands. "Here," said Lawrence removing his cigar. "Will you be so very kind as to unlock the gate over the footbridge? If Val does look us up tonight he's sure to scramble over it, which is awkward for him with his stiff arm." She dropped a key down to Lawrence. A voice—Bernard's called from within, "Good night, old fellow, thanks for a pleasant evening. I'm being washed now." The night was overcast, warm, quiet, and very dark under the trees: there was husbandry in heaven, their candles were all out. And by the bridge under the pleated and tasselled branches of an alder coppice the river ran quiet as the night, only uttering an occasional murmur or a deep sucking gurgle when a rotten stick, framed in foam, span down the silken whirl of an eddy: but down-stream, where waifs of mist curled like smoke off a grey mirror, there was a continual talking of open water, small cold river voices that chattered over a pebbly channel, or heaped themselves up and died down again in the harsh distant murmur of the weir. The quantity of water that passed through the lock gates should have been constant from minute to minute, but the roar of it was not constant, nor the pitch of its note, which fell when Lawrence stood erect, but rose to a shrill overtone when he bent his head: sometimes one would have thought the river was going down in spate, and then the volume of sound dwindled to a mere thread, a lisp in the air. Lawrence was observing these phenomena with a mind vacant of thought when he heard footsteps brushing through the grass by the field path from the village. Val had come, then, after all! Val had naturally no idea that any one was near him. He had reached the gate and was preparing to vault it when out of the dense alder-shadow a hand seized his arm. "So sorry if I startled you." But Val was not visibly startled. "Mrs. Clowes sent me, down to let you in." "Did she? Very good of her, and of you," returned Val's voice, pleasant and friendly. "She always expects me to walk into the river. But, after all, I shouldn't be drowned if I did. Is Clowes gone to bed?" "He's on his way there. Did you want to see him?" "I'll look in for five minutes after Barry has tucked him up. Have you been introduced to Barry yet? He's quite a character." "So I should imagine. He came in to cart Bernard off, and did something clumsy, or Bernard said he did, and Bernard cuffed his head for him. Barry didn't seem to mind much. Why does he stay? Is it devotion?" "He stays because your cousin pays him twice what he would get anywhere else. No, I shouldn't call Barry devoted. But he does his work well, and it isn't anybody's job." "I believe you," Lawrence muttered. "Warm tonight, isn't it? No, thanks, I won't have anything to drink— I've only just finished supper. By the by, let me apologize for my absence this afternoon. I was most awfully sorry to miss you, but I never got away from Countisford till after half past five, and my mare cast a shoe on the way back. Then I tried to get her shod in Liddiard St. Agnes, which is one of those idyllic villages that people write books about, and there I found an Odd-fellows' fete in full swing. The village blacksmith was altogether too harmonious for business, so not being able to cuff his head, like your cousin, I was obliged to walk home. "Really'? Have a cigar if you won't have anything else." Val accepted one, and in default of a match Lawrence made him light it from his own. He was entirely at his ease, though the situation struck him as bizarre, but he did not believe that Val was at ease, no, not for all his natural manner and fertility in commonplace. Lawrence was faintly sorry for the poor devil, but only faintly: after all, an awkward interview once in ten years was a low price to pay for that night which Lawrence never had forgotten and never would forget. He had an excellent memory, photographic and phonographic, a gift that wise men covet for themselves but deprecate in their friends. Lawrence was no Pharisee, but he was not a Samaritan either. He had deliberately set himself to pull up any stray weeds of moral scruple that lingered in a mind stripped bare of Christian ethic, a task harder than some realize, since thousands of men who have no faith in Christ practise virtues that were not known for virtues by the Western world before Christ came to it. But every man is his own special pleader, and Lawrence, whose theory was that one man is as good as another, retained a good hearty prejudice against certain forms of moral failure, and excused it on the ground that it was rather a taste than a principle. He looked directly into Stafford's eyes as the red glow of the cigar flamed and faded between the two heads so close together, and in his own eyes there was the same point of smiling ironic cruelty that Isabel had read in them—the same as Stafford himself had read in them not so many years ago. But apparently Stafford read nothing in them now. "Sit down, won't you? you've had a fagging day." Lawrence indicated the chairs left on the lawn. "Hear me beginning to play the host! As a matter of fact, you must know your way about the place far better than I do. Although we're cousins, Bernard and I have seen next to nothing of each other since we were boys at school. You, Val, must know him better than any one except his wife. I want you to tell me about him. I'm in dangerous country and I need a map." "I should be inclined to vary the metaphor a little and call him an uncharted sea," Val smiled as he threw one leg over the other and settled himself among his cushions. He was dead tired, having been up since six in the morning and on his feet or in the saddle all day. "But I'm at your service, subject always to the proviso that I'm Bernard's agent, which makes my position rather delicate. What is it you want to know?" Since it was whether Clowes behaved decently to his wife, Lawrence shifted in his chair and flicked the ash from his cigar. "Imprimis, whether Bernard has a trout rod I can borrow. I didn't know there was any fishing to be had or I'd have brought my own." "You can have mine: I scarcely ever touch a line now. Certainly not in hay-harvest! I'll send it down for you the first thing—" Was it possible that he was as insouciant as he professed to be? "Oh, thanks very much," Hyde cut in swiftly, but I couldn't borrow yours. I'll find out if Clowes can't lend me one." "As you please." Stafford left it at that and passed on. "But I don't fancy Bernard has ever thrown a line in his life, he is too energetic to make a fisherman. By the way, I suppose you won't be staying any length of time at Wanhope?" Lawrence smiled, the wish was father to the thought: that was more like the Val of old times! "That depends—mainly on my cousin, to be frank: I suspect he'll soon get sick of having a third person in the house." "Oh, probably. But you needn't take any notice of that." Lawrence looked up in surprise. "But, perhaps, that is none of my business. Or will you let me give you one warning, since you've asked for a map? Don't be too prompt to take Bernard at his word. He may be very rude to you and yet not want you to go. He sacks Barry every few weeks. In fact now I come to think of it I'm under notice myself, for last time I saw him he told me to look out for another job. He said what he wanted was a practical man who knew a little about farming." "And you stay on? Quite right, if it suits your book." Unconsciously putting the worst construction on everything Val said or did, Lawrence's conclusion was that probably Val, an amateur farmer, was paid, like Barry, twice what he was worth in the market. "But it wouldn't suit mine. However, I don't imagine Bernard will try it on with me. I'm not Barry. If he hits me I shall hit him back." "Oh, will you?" returned Val, invisibly amused. "I'm not sure that wouldn't be a good plan. It has at least the merit of originality. All the same I'm afraid Mrs. Clowes wouldn't like it, she is a standing obstacle in the way of drastic measures." "But why do you want me to stay?" Lawrence asked more and more surprised. "Well, here is what brought me up tonight, when I knew Bernard would be on his way to bed. Will you—" he leaned forward, his hands clasped between his knees—"stick it out, whatever happens, for a week or two, and keep your eyes open? Life at Wanhope isn't all plain sailing." "Plain sailing for Bernard?" "Or for his wife." "You speak as the friend of the house who sees both sides?" "They're forced on me." "I'll stay as long as I'm comfortable," said Lawrence, cynically frank. "More I can't promise." Val leant back with an imperceptible shrug. He was disappointed but not surprised: there was in Hyde a vein of hard selfishness— not a weakness, for the egoism which openly says "I will consult my own convenience first" is too scornful of public opinion to be called weak, but an acquired defensive quality on which argument would have been thrown away. Val's arm dropped inert, he was tired, not in body alone, but by the strain of contact with another mind, hostile, and pitiless, and dominant. And Lawrence also was content to sit silent, lulled by the rising and falling murmur of the stream, and by that agreeably cruel memory. . . . He had no inclination to recall it to Val, but it lent an emotional piquancy to their intercourse. He had the whip hand of Val through the past, and perhaps the present also. Lawrence had been struck by Val's allusion to Mrs. Clowes. He was the friend of the house, was he? Now the position of a friend of the house who shields a wife from her husband is notoriously a delicate one. Val roused himself. "Well, we'll drop this. I must now say two words on a different subject: I'd rather let it alone, and so I dare say would you, but we shall meet a good deal off and on while you're here, and it had better be got over. I'm sorry if I embarrass you—" "Set your mind at rest," said Lawrence, silkenly brutal. "You don't embarrass me at all." He threw away his cigar and got up laughing, and as Val also rose Lawrence gently slapped him on the back. "I know what you're driving at—that you've not forgotten that small indiscretion of yours, or ceased to regret it. Don't you worry, Val! You always were one of the worrying sort, weren't you? But you need never refer to it again, and I won't if you don't." Surely a generous, a handsome offer! But Stafford only touched with the tips of his fingers the ringed and manicured hand of the elder man. "Thank you! But I wasn't going to say anything of the sort. The fact is that for a long while I've been making up my mind to see you some time when you were in England: there was no hurry, because so long as my father's alive I can do nothing, but when I heard you were coming to Wanhope the opportunity was too good to be missed. Railway fares," Val added with a preoccupied smile, "are a consideration to me. So don't walk away yet, Hyde, please. I have such a vivid recollection of the last time we met. Between the lines at dawn. Do you remember?" "Everything, Val." "You were badly hurt, but before you fainted you dragged a promise out of me." "Dragged it out of you?" Lawrence repeated: "that's one way of putting it!" "But I made some feeble resistance at the time," said Val mildly. "My head wasn't clear then or for a long while after, but I had a—a presentiment that it was a mistake. You meant it kindly." Had he? Lawrence laughed. He had never been able, to analyse the complex of instincts and passions that had determined his dealings with Stafford on that dim day between the lines. "You were in a damned funk weren't you, Val?" Stafford gave a slight start, the reaction of the prisoner under a blow. But apart from the coarse cynicism of it, which irritated him, it was no more than he had foreseen, and from then on till the end he did not flinch. "Yes, anything you like: you can't overstate it. But my point is that I gave you my parole. Will you release me from it?" "Good God!" said Lawrence. He had never been more surprised in his life. "Come in: let us talk this over in the light." CHAPTER VII Through the open windows of the drawingroom, where candlesticks of twisted silver glimmered among Laura's old, silvery brocades, and dim mirrors, and branches of pink and white rosebuds blooming deliciously in rose-coloured Dubarry jars, the two men came in together, Lawrence keenly on the watch. But observation was wasted on Stafford who had nothing to conceal, who was merely what he appeared to be, a faded and tired-looking man of middle height, with blue eyes and brown hair turning grey, and wellworn evening clothes a trifle rubbed at the cuffs. It was difficult to connect this gentle and unassuming person with the fiery memory of the war, and Lawrence without apology took hold of Stafford's arm like a surgeon and tried to flex the rigid elbow-muscles, and to distinguish with his fingers used to handling wounds the hard seams and hollows below its shrunken joint. The action, which was overbearing was by no means redeemed by the intention, which was brutal. "Surely after all these years you don't propose to confess, Val?" "I should like to make some sort of amends." "Too late: these things can never be undone." "No, of course not. Undone? no, nothing once done can be undone. "But one needn't follow a wrong path to the bitter end. You made me give you that promise for the sake of discipline and morale. But of the men who were in the trenches with us that night how many are left? Your battalion were pretty badly cut up at Cambrai, weren't they? And the survivors are all back in civil life like ourselves. If it were to come out now there aren't twenty men who would remember anything about it: except of course here in Chilmark, where they know my people so well." "But you surely don't contemplate writing to the War Office? I've no idea what course they would take, but they'd be safe to make themselves unpleasant. I might even come in for a reprimand myself! That's a fate I could support with equanimity, but what about you? If I were you I shouldn't care to be hauled up for an interview!" "Really, if you'll forgive my saying so, I don't want to enter into contingencies at all. Give me my promise back, Hyde, there's a good fellow, it's worth nothing now to anyone but the owner." "What about your own people?" said Lawrence, his hands in his pockets, and falling unawares into the tone of the orderly room. "You'll do nothing while your father's alive: I'm glad you've sense enough for that: but what about your brother and sister? You're suffering under some unpractical attack of remorse, Val, and like most penitent souls you think of nothing but yourself." "On the contrary, I shrink very much from bringing distress on other people. I'm well aware," said Val slowly, "that a man who does what I've done forfeits his right to take an easy way out." "An easy way?" "Believe me, I haven't found the way you imposed on me an easy one." "Poor wretch!" said Lawrence under his breath. Stafford heard, perhaps he was meant to hear: and he glanced out over the dark turf on which the windows traced a golden oblong, over the trees, dark and mysterious except where the same light caught and bronzed the tips of their branches. In its glow every leaf stood out separate and defined, clearer than by day through the contrast of the immense surrounding darkness: and so it had been in that bit of French forest years ago, when the wild bright searchlights lit up its plague-spotted glades. Civilians talk glibly of courage and cowardice who have never smelt the odour of corruption. . . . "What's your motive? Some misbegotten sense of duty?" "Partly," said Val, turning from the window. How like his eyes were to his young sister's! The impression was unwelcome, and Lawrence flung it off. "I ought never to have given way to you. I ought to have faced Wynn-West and let him deal with me as he thought fit. After all, I was of no standing in the regiment. A boy of nineteen—what on earth would it have signified? I was so very young." Nineteen! yes, one called a lad young at nineteen even in those pitiless days. Under normal conditions he would have had two or three years' more training before he was required to shoulder the responsibilities and develop the braced muscles of manhood. "Anyhow it's all over now—" "No, you forget." A wave of colour swept over Val's face but his voice was steady. "Through me the regiment holds a distinction it hasn't earned, and the distinction is in hands that don't deserve to hold it. That isn't consonant with the traditions of the service." "Oh, when it comes to the honour of the Army—!" Lawrence jeered at him. "There speaks the soldier born and bred. But I was only a 'temporary.' Give me a personal reason." "Well, I can do that too! I hate sailing under false colours. The good folk of Chilmark; my own people; Bernard, Laura . . . ." Lawrence's eyes began to sparkle: when a man's voice deepens over a woman's name—! "Oh, I dare say nothing will ever come of it," Val resumed after a moment: "my father may live another thirty years, and by that time I should be too old to stand in a white sheet. Or perhaps I shall only tell one or two people—" "Mrs. Clowes?" "I beg your pardon?" "You would like to tell my cousin and his wife?" "I should like to feel myself a free agent, which I'm not now, because I'm under parole to you." "And so you will remain," said Lawrence coldly. "You mean that?" "Thoroughly. I've no wish to distress you, Val, but I'm no more convinced now than I was ten years ago that you can be trusted to judge for yourself. You were an impulsive boy then with remarkably little self-control: you're—forgive my saying so—an impulsive man now, capable of doing things that in five minutes you would be uncommonly sorry for. How long would Bernard keep your secret? If I'm not much mistaken you would lose your billet and the whole county would hear why. The whole thing's utter rubbish. You make too much of your ribbon: you—I—it would never have been given if Dale's father hadn't been a brass hat." Stafford was ashy pale. "I know you think you're just." "No, I don't. I'm not just, my good chap: I'm weakly, idiotically generous. In your heart of hearts you're grateful to me. Now let's drop all this. Nothing you can say will have the slightest effect, so you may as well not say it." He stood by Val's chair, laughing down at him and gently gripping him by the shoulder. "Be a man, Val! you're not nineteen now. You've got a comfortable job and the esteem of all who know you—take it and be thankful: it's more than you deserve. If you must indulge in a hair shirt, wear it under your clothes. It isn't necessary to embarrass other people by undressing in public." Thought is free: one may be at a man's mercy and in his debt and keep one's own opinion of him, impersonal and cold. With a faint smile on his lips Val got up and strolled over to the piano. "Hullo, what's all this music lying about?" he said in his ordinary manner. "Has Laura been playing? Good, I'm so glad: Bernard can hardly ever stand it. See the first fruits of your bracing influence! Oh, the Polonaises . . ." And then he in his turn began to play, but not the melancholy fiery lyrics that had soothed Laura's unsatisfied heart. Val, a thorough musician, went for sympathy to the classics. Impulsive? There was not much impulse left in this quiet, reticent man, who with his old trouble fresh on him could sit down and play a chorale of Bach or a prelude of Mozart, subordinating his own imperious anguish to the grave universal daylight of the elder masters. Long since Val had resolved that no shadow from him should fall across any other life. He had foresworn "that impure passion of remorse," and so keen an observer as Rowsley had grown up in his intimacy without suspecting anything wrong. Unfortunately for Val, however, he still suffered, though he was now denied all expression, all relief: the wounded mind bled inwardly. It was no wonder Val's hair was turning grey. Lawrence, no mean judge of music, understood much—not all—of the significance of Val's playing. He was an imaginative man— far more so than Val, who would have lived an ordinary life and travelled on ordinary lines of thought but for the war, which wrenched so many men out of their natural development. But it was again unfortunate for Val that the sporting instinct ran strong in Captain Hyde. He was irritated by Val's grave superior dignity, and deep and unacknowledged there was working in him the instinct of the bully, the love of cruelty, overlaid by layer on layer of civilization, of chivalry, of decency, yet native to the human heart and quick to reassert itself at any age: in the boy who thrashes a smaller boy, in the young man who takes advantage of a woman, in the fighter who hounds down surrendered men. He settled himself in a chair close to the piano. "Val, I'm very glad to have met you. Having taken so much upon me," he was smiling into Val's eyes, "I've often wondered what had become of you. This," he lightly touched Val's arm, "was a cruel handicap. I had to disable you, but it need not have been permanent." "Do you mind moving? you're in my light." He shifted his chair by an inch or so. "After all, what's a single failure of nerve? Physical causes—wet, cold, indigestion, tight puttees—account for nine out of ten of these queer breakdowns. At all events you've paid, Val, paid twice over: when I read your name in the Honours List I laughed, but I was sorry for you. The sword-and-epaulets business would have been mild compared to that." "Cat and mouse, is it?" said Val, resting his hands on the keys. "What?" "I'm not going to stand this sort of thing, Hyde, not for a minute." "I don't know what you mean," said Lawrence, reddening slowly to his forehead. But it was a lie: he was not one of those who can overstep limits with impunity. The streak of vulgarity again! and worse than vulgarity: Andrew Hyde's sardonic old voice was ringing in his ears, "Lawrence, you'll never be a gentleman." "All right, we'll leave it at that. Only don't do it again." Lawrence was dumb. "Here's Mrs. Clowes." Val rose as Laura came in, released at length from attendance on her husband. "I heard you playing," she said, giving him her hand with her sweet, friendly smile. "So you've introduced yourself to Captain Hyde? I hope you were nice to him, for my gratitude to him is boundless. I haven't seen Bernard looking so fit or so bright for months and months! Now sit down, both of you, and we'll have cigarettes and coffee. Ring, Val, will you—? it's barely half past ten. "I can only stay for one cigarette, Laura: I must get home to bed." "But, my dear boy, how tired you look!" exclaimed Laura. "You do too much—I'm sure you do too much. He wears himself out, Lawrence—oh! my scarf!" She was wearing a silver scarf over her black dress, and as she moved it fluttered up and caught on the chain round her throat. "Unfasten me, please, Val," she said, bending her fair neck, and Val was obliged laboriously to disentangle the silken cobweb from the spurs of her clear-set diamonds, a process which fascinated Lawrence, whose mind was more French than English in its permanent interest in women. Certainly Val's office of friend of the family was not less delicate because Laura, secure in her few years seniority, treated him like a younger brother! Watching, not Val, but Val's reflection in a mirror, Lawrence overlooked no shade of constraint, no effort that Val made to avoid touching with his finger-tips the satin allure of Laura's exquisite skin. "Poor miserable Val!" Suspicion was crystallizing into certainty. "Or is it poor Bernard? No, I swear she doesn't know. Does he know himself?" A servant had brought in coffee, and Lawrence in his quality of cousin poured out two cups and carried them over to Laura and to Val. "Well, I'm damned!" murmured Lawrence as Val refastened the clasp of the chain. "Picturesque, all this.— Here, Val, here's your coffee." "But do you know each other so well as that?" exclaimed Laura, arching her wren's-feather eyebrows. "I was an infant subaltern when Hyde knew me," said Val laughing, "and he was a howling swell of a captain. Do you remember that night you all dined with us, sir, when we were in billets? We stood you champagne—" "Purchased locally. I remember the champagne." "Dine with us tomorrow night," said Laura. "Do! and bring Isabel." Lawrence gave an imperceptible start: for the last hour he had forgotten Isabel's existence except when her eyes had looked at him out of her brother's face. "The child will enjoy it, I never knew any one so easily pleased; and you and Lawrence and Bernard can rag one another to your heart's content. Yes, you will, I know you will, Army men always do when they get together; and you're all boys, even Bernard, even you with your grey hair, my dear Val; as for Lawrence, he's only giving himself airs." "Yes, do bring your sister," said Lawrence. "She is the most charming young girl I've met for years, if a man of my mature age may say so. She is so natural, a rare thing nowadays: the modern jeune fille is a sophisticated product." "Bravo, Lawrence!" cried Mrs. Clowes, clapping her hands. "Now, Val, didn't I tell you Isabel was going to be very, very pretty? That's settled, then, you'll both come: and, to please me," she looked not much older than Isabel as she took hold of the lapel of Val's coat, "will you wear your ribbon? I know you hate wearing it in civilian kit! But I do so love to see you in it: and it's not as if there would be any one here but ourselves." Lawrence swung round on his heel and walked away. One may enjoy the pleasures of the chase and yet draw the line at watching an application of the rack, and it sickened him to remember that his own hand had given a turn to the screw. It had needed that brief colloquy to let him see what Stafford's life was like at Wanhope, and in what slow nerve-by-nerve laceration amends were being made. He admired the gallantry of Stafford's reply. "My dear Laura, I would tie myself up in ribbon from head to foot if it would give you pleasure. I'll wear it if you like, though my superior officer will certainly rag me if I do." "No, I shan't," said Lawrence shortly. CHAPTER VIII "And now tell me," murmured Mrs. Clowes in the mischievously caressing tone that she kept for Isabel, "did mamma's little girl enjoy her party?" "Rather!" said Isabel—with a great sigh, the satisfied sigh of a dog curling up after a meal. "They were lovely strawberries. And what do you call that French thing? Oh, that's what a vol-au-vent is, is it? I wish I knew how to make it, but probably it's one of those recipes that begin 'Take twelve eggs and a quart of cream.' I wish nice things to eat weren't so dear, Jimmy would love it. Captain Hyde took two helps—did you see?—big ones! If he always eats as much as he did tonight he'll be fat before he's fifty, which will be a pity. He ate three times what Val did." "Is that what you were thinking of all the time? I noticed you didn't say very much." "Well, I was between Captain Hyde and Major Clowes, and they neither of them think I'm grown up," explained Isabel. "They talked to each other over the top of me. Oh no, not rudely, Major Clowes was as nice as he could be" (Isabel salved her conscience by reflecting that this was verbally true since Major Clowes could never he nice), "and Captain Hyde asked me if I was fond of dolls—" "My dear Isabel!" "Or words to that effect. Oh! it's perfectly fair, I'm not grown up, or only by fits and starts. Some of me is a weary forty-five but the rest is still in pigtails. It's curious, isn't it? considering that I'm nearly twenty. Let's go through the wood, my stockings are coming down." Out of sight of the house in a clearing of the loosely planted alder-coppice by the bridge, she pulled them up, slowly and candidly: white cotton stockings supported by garters of black elastic. "After all," she continued, "I'm housekeeper, and in common politeness we shall have to dine you back, so I really did want to see what sort of things Captain Hyde likes. But it's no use, he won't like anything we give him. Not though we strain our resources to the uttermost. Laura! would Mrs. Fryar give me the receipt for that vol-au-vent? I don't suppose we could run to it, but I should love to try." "Mrs. Fryar would be flattered," said Laura, finding a chair in the forked stem of a wild apple-tree, while Isabel sat plump down on the net of moss-fronds and fine ivy and grey wood-violets at her feet. "But, my darling, you're not to worry your small head over vol-au-vents! Lawrence will like one of your own roast chickens just as well, or any simple thing—" "Oh no, Lawrence won't!" Isabel gave a little laugh. "Excuse my contradicting you, but Lawrence isn't a bit fond of simple things. That's why he doesn't like me, because I'm simple, simple as a daisy. I don't mind—much," she added truthfully. "I can survive his most extended want of interest. After all what can you expect if you go out to dinner in the same nun's veiling frock you wore when you were confirmed, with the tucks let down and the collar taken out? O! Laura, I wish someone would give me twenty pounds on condition that I spent it all on dress! I'd buy—I'd buy—oh,—silk stockings, and long gloves, and French cambric underclothes, and chiffon nightgowns like those Yvonne wears (but they aren't decent: still that doesn't matter so long as you're not married, and they are so pretty)! And a homespun tailor-made suit with a seam down the back and open tails: and—and—one of those real Panamas that you can pull through a wedding ring: and—oh! dear, I am greedy! It must be because I never have any clothes at all that I'm always wanting some. I ache all over when I look at catalogues. Isn't it silly?" If so it was a form of silliness with which Mrs. Clowes was in full sympathy. In her world, to be young and pretty gave a woman a claim on Fate to provide her with pretty dresses and the admiration of men. As for Yvonne, till she married Jack Bendish she had never been out of debt in her life. "No, it's the most natural thing on earth," said Laura. "How I wish—!" "No, no," said Isabel hastily. "It's very, very sweet of you, but even Jimmy wouldn't like it: and as for Val I don't know what he'd say! Poor old Val, he wants some new evening clothes himself, and it's worse for him than for me because men do so hate to look shabby and out at elbows. He's worn that suit for ten years. My one consolation is that Captain Hyde couldn't wear a suit he wore ten years ago. It would burst." "Isabel! really! you ridiculous child, why have you such a spite against poor Lawrence? Any one would think he was a perfect Daniel Lambert! Do you know he's a pukka sportsman and has shot all over the world? Lions and tigers, and rhinoceros, and grizzly bears, and all sorts of ferocious animals! He's promised me a black panther skin for my parlour and he's persuaded Bernard to call in Dr. Verney for his neuritis, so I won't hear another word against him!" "Has he? H'm. . . . No, I haven't any prejudice against him: in fact I like him," said Isabel, smiling to herself. "But he reminds me of Tom Wallis at the Prince of Wales's Feathers. Do you remember Tom? 'Poor Tom,' Mrs. Wallis always says, 'he went from bad to worse. First it was a drop too much of an evening: and then he began getting drunk mornings: and then he 'listed for a soldier!' Not that Captain Hyde would get drunk, but he has the same excitable temperament. . . . Laura!" "What is it?" said Mrs. Clowes, framing the young face between her hands as Isabel rose up kneeling before her. In the quivering apple-tree shadow Isabel's eyes were very dark, and penetrating and reflective too, as if she had just undergone one of those transitions from childhood to womanhood which are the mark and the charm of her variable age. Laura was puzzled by her judgment of Lawrence Hyde, so keen, yet so wide of the truth as Laura saw it: "excitable" was the last thing that Laura would have called him, and she couldn't see any likeness to Tom Wallis. But one can't argue over a man's character with a child. "Why so serious?" "This evening, at dinner, weren't there some queer undercurrents?" "Undercurrents!" Laura drew her hands away. She looked startled and nervous. "What sort of undercurrents?" "When they were chaffing Val about his ribbon. Oh, I don't know," said Isabel vaguely. Laura drew a breath of relief. "I was sorry you made him wear it. But he'd cut his hand off to please you, darling. You don't really realize the way you can make Val do anything you like." "Nonsense," said Laura, but with an indulgent smile, which was her way of saying that it was true but did not signify. She was no coquette, but she preferred to create an agreeable impression. Always in France, where women are the focus of social interest, there had been men who did as Laura Selincourt pleased, and the incense which Val alone continued to burn was not ungrateful to her altar. "As if Val would mind about a little thing like that." Isabel shook her head. "Perhaps you weren't attending. Major Clowes was very down on him for wearing it—chaffing him, of course, but chaffing half in earnest: a snowball with a stone in it. Naturally Val wasn't going to say you made him—" "No, but Lawrence did: or I should have cut in myself." "Yes, after a minute, he interfered, and then Major Clowes shut up, but it was all rather—rather queer, and I'm sure Val hated it. You won't make him do it again, will you? Val's so odd. Laura—don't tell any one—I sometimes think Val's very unhappy." "Val, unhappy? You fanciful child, this is worse than Tom Wallis! What should make Val unhappy? He might be dull," said Laura ruefully. "Life at Wanhope isn't exciting! But he's keen on his work and very fond of the country. Val is one of the most contented people I know." A shadow fell over Isabel's face, the veil that one draws down when one has offered a confidence to hands that are not ready to receive it. "Then it must be all my imagination." She abandoned the subject as rapidly as she had introduced it. "O! dear, I am sleepy." She stretched herself and yawned, opening her mouth wide and shutting it with a little snap like a kitten. "I was up at six to give Val his breakfast, and I've been running about all day, what with the school treat next week, and Jimmy's new night-shirts that I had to get the stuff for and cut them out, and choir practice, and Fanny taking it into her head to make rhubarb jam. How can London people stay up till twelve or one o'clock every night? But of course they don't get up at six." "Have a snooze in my hammock," suggested Laura. "I see Barry coming, which means that Bernard is going off and I shall have to run away and leave you, and probably the men won't come out for some time. Take forty winks, you poor child, it will freshen you up." "I never, never go to sleep in the daytime," said Isabel firmly. "It's a demoralizing habit. But I shouldn't mind tumbling into your hammock, thank you very much." And, while Mrs. Clowes went away with Barry, she slipped across to Laura's large comfortable cot, swung waist-high between two alders that knelt on the river brink. Isabel sprawled luxuriously at full length, one arm under her head and the other dropped over the netting: her young frame was tired, little flying aches of fatigue were darting pins and needles through her knees and shoulders and the base of her spine. The evening was very warm and the stars winked at her, they were green diamonds that sparkled through chinks in the alder leafage overhead: round dark leaves like coins, and scattered in clusters, like branches of black bloom. Near at hand the river ran in silken blackness, but below the coppice, where it widened into shallows, it went whispering and rippling over a pebbly bottom on its way to the humming thunder of the mill. And in a fir-tree not far off a nightingale was singing, now a string of pearls dropping bead by bead from his throat, now rich turns and grace-notes, and now again a reiterated metallic chink which melted into liquid fluting: Vogek im Tannenwald Pfeifet so hell: Pfeifet de Wald aus und ein, wo wird mein Schatze sein? Vogele im Tannenwald pfeifet so hell. Isabel was still so young that she felt the beauty more deeply when she could link it with some poetic association, and as she listened to the nightingale she murmured to herself "'In some melodious plot of beechen green with shadows numberless'—but it isn't a beech, it's a fir-tree," and then wandering off into another literary channel, "'How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves! Eternal passion—eternal pain' . . . but I don't believe he feels any pain at all. It is we who feel pain. He's not been long married, and it's lovely weather, and there's plenty for them to eat, and they're in love . . . what a heavenly night it is! I wish some one were in love with me. I wonder if any one ever will be. "How thrilling it would be to refuse him! Of course I couldn't possibly accept him—not the first: it would be too slow, because then one couldn't have any more. One would be like Laura. Poor Laura! Now if she were in that tree"—Isabel's ideas were becoming slightly confused—"it would be natural for her to be melancholy—only if she were a bird she wouldn't care, she would fly off with some one else and leave Major Clowes, and all the other birds would come and peck him to death. They manage these things better in bird land." Isabel's eyes shut but she hurriedly opened them again. "I'm not going to go to sleep. It's perfectly absurd. It can't be much after nine o'clock. I dare say Captain Hyde will come out before so very long . . . I should like to talk to him again by myself. He isn't so interesting when other people are there. I wonder why I told Laura he was getting fat? He isn't: he couldn't be, to travel all over the world and shoot black panthers. And if he did take two helps of vol-au-vent, you must remember, Isabel, he's a big man—well over six feet—and requires good support. He certainly is not greedy or he would have tried to pick out the oysters: all men love oysters. "He was nice about Val's ribbon, too . . . wish I understood about that ribbon. Val was grateful: he said 'Thanks, Hyde' while Major Clowes was speaking to Barry. Laura isn't stupid, but she never understands Val. 'Contented?' My dearest darling Val! If he were being roasted over a slow fire he would be 'contented' if Laura was looking on. That's the worst of being perfectly unselfish: people never realize that you're unselfish at all. Wives don't seem to hear what their husbands say. Often and often Major Clowes is absolutely insulting to Val, before Laura and before me. But Laura always looks on Val as a boy. Perhaps if Captain Hyde hears it going on he'll interfere and shut Major Clowes up as he did tonight. He can manage Major Clowes . . . which is clever of him! 'A strong, silent man'—as a matter of fact he talks a good deal. . . . But I loved him for sitting on Major Clowes. I'd rather he were nice to Val than to me. "But he might be nice to me too. . . . "He was, yesterday afternoon. How he coloured up! He was absolutely natural for the minute. That can't often happen. People who don't like giving themselves away are thrilling when they do." Another yawn came upon her. "O! dear, I really mustn't go to sleep. What a lulling noise you make, you old river! I don't think I can get up at six tomorrow. This hammock is as comfortable as a bed. 'The young girl reclined in a graceful attitude, her head pillowed on her slender hand, her long dark lashes entangled and resting on her ivory cheek.' Well, they couldn't rest anywhere else: unless they were long enough to rest on her nose. 'Her—her breathing was soft and regular . . .'" It became so. Isabel slept. Val would rather have owed no gratitude to a man he disliked so much as Hyde. When Bernard was wheeled away, an interchange of perfunctory civilities was followed by a constrained silence, which Val broke by rising. "Hyde, if you'll excuse me, I'll say five words to Bernard before Barry begins getting him to bed. There's a right of way dispute going on that he liked me to keep him posted up in." "Do," said Lawrence vaguely. He brushed past Val and escaped into the garden. Lawrence was enjoying his stay at Wanhope, but tonight he felt defrauded, though he knew not why. He had had an agreeable day. In the morning Jack Bendish had appeared on horseback and Lawrence had ridden over with him to lunch at Wharton, a sufficiently amusing experience, what with the crabbed high-spirited whims of Jack's grandfather and the old-fashioned courtesy of Lord Grantchester, and Yvonne's romantic toilette: later Laura had joined them and they had played bowls on the famous green: in the cool of the evening he had strolled home with Laura through the fields. Dinner too had been amusing in its way, the wines were excellent, the parlour maid waited at table like a deft ghost, and he recognized in Mrs. Fryar an artist who was thrown away alike on Bernard's devotion to roast beef and Val's inability to remember what he ate. Yet Lawrence was left vaguely discontented. Bernard's manner to Val had set his teeth on edge. Bernard could have meant no harm: no one had ever known the truth except Lawrence and Val, and possibly Dale with such torn shreds of consciousness as H. E. and barbed wire had left him: but in all innocence Bernard had set the rack to work as deftly as Lawrence could have done it himself. Lawrence pitied—no, that was a slip of the mind: he was not so weak as to pity Stafford, but their intercourse was difficult, genant. And Isabel Stafford too: Clowes had left her out of the conversation as though she were a child, and though Lawrence tried to bring her in she remained, so to say, in the nursery most of the time, speaking when she was spoken to but without any of her characteristic freshness and boldness. She was the schoolgirl that Clowes expected her to be. Her very dress irritated Lawrence, as if he had seen a fine painting in a tawdry frame, or a pearl of price foiled by a spurious setting. He had not felt any glow at all, and was left to suppose his fancy had played him a trick. Disappointing! and now there was no chance of revising his impression, for apparently she had gone away with Laura—who should have known better than to leave Captain Hyde to his own devices. But probably Miss Stafford had refused to face the men alone: it was what a little shy country girl would do. Isabel's arm hanging over the edge of the hammock, and pearly white in the dark, was his first warning of her presence. He crossed the wood with his hunter's step and found her lapped in dreams, the starlight that filtered between the alder branches chequering her with a faint diaper of light and shade. Only the very young can afford to be, seen asleep, when the face sinks back into its original repose, and lines and wrinkles reappear in the loss of all that smiling charm of expression which may efface them by day. Laura, asleep, looked old and haggard. But Isabel presented a blank page, a face virginally pure, and candid, and lineless: from the attitude of her young body one would have thought she was constructed without bones, and from her serenity it might have been a child who slept there in the June night, so placidly entrusting herself to its mild embrace. Vividly aware that he had no right to watch her, Lawrence stood watching her, though afraid at every breath that she would wake up: it was hard to believe that even in her sleep she could remain insensible of his eyes. Here was the authentic Isabel, the girl who had enchanted him on the moor: the incarnation of that classic beauty by which alone his spirit was capable of being touched to fine issues. The alder branches quivered, their clusters of black shadow fell like an embroidered veil over the imperfections of her dress, but what light there was shone clear on her head and throat, and the pearly moulding of her shoulder, based where her sleeve was dragged down a little by the tension of her weight upon it. All the mystery of womanhood and all its promise of life in bud and life not yet sown lay on this young girl asleep in the starshine. Lights flashed up in the house, figures were moving between the curtains: Laura had left Bernard, soon she would come out into the garden and call to Isabel, and Isabel would wake and his chance be lost. His chance? Isabel had rashly incurred a forfeit and would have to pay. The frolic was old, there was plenty of precedent for it, and not for one moment did Lawrence dream of letting her off. A moth, a dead leaf might have settled on her sleeping lips and she would have been none the wiser, and just such a moth's touch he promised himself, the contact of a moment, but enough to intoxicate him with its sweetness, and the first—yes, he believed it would be the first: not from any special faith in Isabel's obduracy, but because no one in Chilmark was enough of a connoisseur to appreciate her. Yes, the first, the bloom on the fruit, the unfolding of the bud, he promised himself that: and warily he stooped over Isabel, who slept as tranquil as though she were in her own room under the vicarage eaves. Lawrence held his breath. If she were to wake? Then?—Oh, then the middleaged friend of the family claiming his gloves and his jest! But Lawrence was not feeling middle-aged. "O! dear," said Isabel, "I've been asleep!" She sat up rubbing her eyes. "Laura, are you there?" But no one was there. Yet, though she was alone, in the solitude of the alder shade Isabel blushed scarlet. "What a ridiculous dream! worse than ridiculous, What would Val say if he knew? Really, Isabel, you ought to be whipped!" She slipped to her feet and peered suspiciously this way and that into the shadowy corners of the wood. Not a step: not the rustle of a leaf: no one. Yet Isabel's cheeks continued to burn, till with a little frightened laugh she buried them in her hands. "O! it was— it was a dream—?" CHAPTER IX Lawrence's reflections when he went to bed that night were more insurgent and disorderly than usual. In his negative philosophy, when he shut the door of his room, it was his custom to shut the door on memory too—to empty his mind of all its contents except the physical disposition to sleep. He cultivated an Indian's self-involved and deliberate vacancy. On this his second night at Wanhope however—Wanhope which was to bring him a good many white nights before he was done with it—he lay long awake, watching the stars that winked and glittered in the field of his open window, the same stars that were perhaps shining on Isabel's pillow. . . . Isabel: it was on her that his thoughts ran with a tiring persistency against which his common sense rebelled. A kiss! what was it after all? A Christmas forfeit, a prank of which even Val Stafford could have said no worse than that it was beneath the dignity of his six and thirty years: only too flattering for such a little country girl, sunburnt, simple, and occasionally tongue-tied. The lady of the ivory frame (whom Lawrence had fished out of her seclusion and set up on his dressing table, to the disgust of Caroline: who was a Baptist, and didn't care to dust a person who wore so few clothes), the lady of the ivory frame was far handsomer than Isabel, or at least handsome in a far more finished style. Lawrence had the curiosity to get out of bed and carry Mrs. Cleve to the window. Yes, she certainly was an expensive luxury, this smiling lady, her eyes large and liquid, her waved hair rippling under its diamond aigrette, her rather wide, eighteenth century shoulders dimpling down under a collar of diamonds to the half bare swell of her breast: and for an amateur of her type she was charming, with her tired, sophisticated glance and her fresh mouth, like a rouged child: but it was borne in on Lawrence that she was not for him. He had kissed her two or three times, as occasion served and she seemed to desire it, but he had never lain awake afterwards, nor had his heart beaten any faster, no, not even in the summerhouse at Bingley when she was fairly in his arms. He pitched the photograph into a drawer. Frederick Cleve was safe, for him. Strolling out on the balcony, Lawrence folded his arms on the balustrade. The night was hot: perhaps that was why he could not sleep. By his watch it was ten minutes past two. The moon was near her setting. She lay on her back with tumbled clouds all round her: mother & pearl clouds, quilted, and tinged with a sheen of opal. He wondered whether Bernard was asleep: poor Bernard, lying alone through the dreary hours. Perhaps it was because Lawrence was not at all like a curate that Bernard had already made his cousin free of certain dark corners which Val had never been allowed to explore. "My wife? She's not my wife," Clowes had said, staring up at Lawrence with his wide black eyes. "She's my nurse." And he went on defining the situation with the large coarse frankness which he permitted himself since his accident, and which did not repel Lawrence, as it would have repelled Val or Jack Bendish, because Lawrence habitually used the same frankness in his own mind. There was some family likeness between the cousins, and it came out in their common contempt for modern delicacy, which Bernard called squeamishness and Lawrence damned in more literary language as the Victorian manner. The moon dipped lower over the trees while Lawrence took one of his sharp turns of self-analysis. Most men live in a haze, but Lawrence was naturally a clear thinker, and he had neither a warm heart nor a sentimental temperament to blind him. Cleve was safe: but with his Rabelaisian candour and cultivated want of scruple Lawrence reflected that Cleve had been anything but safe at Bingley. Whence the change? From Isabel Stafford! Lawrence shrugged his shoulders: he was accustomed to examine himself in a dry light of curiosity, and no vice or weakness shocked him, but here was pure folly. What was he doing at Wanhope? "I'm contracting attachments," he reflected, unbuttoning his silk jacket to feel the night air cool on his chest, a characteristic action: wind, sunshine, a wandering scent, the freshness of dew, all the small sensuous pleasures that most men neglect, Lawrence would go out of his way to procure. "I'm breaking my rule." Long ago he had resolved never to let himself get fond of any one again, because in this world of chance and change, at the mercy of a blindly striking power, the game is not worth the candle: one suffers too much. As for Miss Stafford, one need not be a professed stole to draw the line at a little country girl, pious to insipidity and simple to the brink of silliness. Here Lawrence, not being one of those who deny facts when they are unwelcome, caught himself up: she was not insipid and her power over him was undeniable. Twice within forty-eight hours she had defeated his will, and what was stranger was that each time he had surrendered eagerly, feeling for the moment as though it didn't matter what he said or did before Isabel.—It was at this point of his analysis that Lawrence began to take fright. "You rascal," he said to himself, "so that's why you're off Mrs. Cleve, is it? What is it you want—to marry the child? You would be sick to death of her in six weeks—and haven't you had enough of giving hostages to Fortune?" Hostages to fortune: that pregnant phrase frightens men who fear nothing else in heaven or earth. But not one of Hyde's friends knew that he had ever given fortune a hostage. He was not reserved as a rule: indeed he was always willing to argue creed and code with a frankness rare in the self-conscious English race: he was never shy and there was little in him that was distinctively English. But he was too subtle and inconsistent for the average homogeneous Englishman, and not even the comrades of trench and tent knew much about his private life. Lawrence was one of those products of a high civilization which have in them pretty strong affinities with barbarism,—but always with a difference. The noble savage tortures his enemy out of hate or revenge: Lawrence, more sophisticated in brutality, was capable of doing it by way of a psychological experiment. The savage takes a short cut from desire to possession: Lawrence though his blood ran hot curbed it from caution, because in modern life women are a burden and a drag. This was the trained and tempered Lawrence Hyde, a personage of great good humour and numitigable egoism. This was the companion of easy morals with whom Lawrence was on familiar terms. But on that first white night at Wanhope Lawrence grew dimly aware of the upheaval of deeper forces, as if his youth were stirring in its grave. When Laura Clowes smiled at him with her gallant bearing: when Bernard gripped his hand in wishing him good night: when Val in the middle of the psychological experiment pierced him with his grave tired eyes, all sorts of feelings long dormant and believed to be dead came to life in Lawrence: pity, and affection, and remorse and shame. "Hang the fellow!" Lawrence reflected. "He's too like his sister. And Isabel? She is a child." Whose voice was it that answered, "This is the woman I have been waiting for all my life?" And then, turning at bay, he came to a sufficiently cynical conclusion. "No nonsense!" he said to himself. "Your trouble is that she's twenty and you're six and thirty, which is a dangerous age. But you don't want to marry her, and there's no middle course. Fruit defendu, mon ami: hands off! If you can't be sensible you'll have to shift out of Wanhope and compromise on Mrs. Cleve." The rain held off, and after breakfast—a cheery meal at which Bernard for the first time for many months appeared dressed and in a good temper—Lawrence fulfilled the main duty of a guest by going for a walk. He came by footbridge and field path into the High Street, where he was immediately buttonholed by the vicar. Lawrence had a fixed idea that all priests were hypocrites: they must be, since as educated men they could not well believe the fables they were paid to teach! But it was hard to associate hypocrisy with Mr. Stafford, whose fond ambition it was to nail Lawrence Hyde to lecture on his Chinese travels before the Bible Class. "Oh, nothing religious," he explained, holding his victim firmly by the coat as Lawrence edged away. "Only half an hour's story-telling to put a few new ideas into their heads—as if you were talking to a young brother of your own. I'm always trying to get them to emigrate, but they need a great deal of shoving." Lawrence said they could not emigrate to China, and, further, that he didn't regard them as brothers. "How narrow you are, some of you University men!" sighed Mr. Stafford. "What a concept of society! But," brightening, "you're not so bad as you're painted. Come, come! a fifth-of-August recruit can't very well deny that we're all brothers in arms?" Before Lawrence escaped he was not sure that he hadn't pledged himself to an address on "Fringes of the Empire," with special reference to the C.U.M.C.A. It was too sunny to fish, but the trout lured him, and from the cross-roads by the stone bridge he struck into a footpath that led upstream into the hills, 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.