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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No is there any?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, anything that’s going,” said Val.

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

“What?”

“What’s the matter with your skirt?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Very good of her. Why?”

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

“Possibly,” said Val.

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

“No, in the Winchesters,” said Isabel. “Do I mean the Winchesters, Val? What was Major Clowes’ old regiment?”

“Clowes was in the Wintons.”

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

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

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

“Lawrence Hyde?”

“Yes, that’s it! Then you really do remember him?”

“Er yes. Is that lamp smoking, Rowsley? You might turn it down a trifle, I can’t reach.”

“Let me, let me? What was he like?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Was he? Then he was nice?”

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

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

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

“Well, I’ve never heard that before,” said Rowsley to his fourth egg.

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

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

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

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

“Yes: oughtn’t I to have?”

“No.”

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

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

“You are sweet, Val,” said Isabel gratefully.

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