The reason why Lawrence found Isabel scrubbing Mrs. Drury’s floor was that Dorrie’s pretty, sluttish little mother had been whisked off to the Cottage Hospital with appendicitis an hour earlier. She was in great distress about Dorrie when Isabel, coming in with the parish magazine, offered to stay while Drury went to fetch an aunt from Winterbourne Stoke. When Drury drove up in a borrowed farm cart, Isabel without expecting or receiving many thanks dragged her bicycle to the top of the glen and pelted off across the moor. Her Sunbeam was worn and old, so old that it had a fixed wheel, but what was that to Isabel? She put her feet up and rattled down the hill, first on the turf and then on the road, in a happy reliance on her one serviceable brake.

Her father was locked in his study writing a sermon: Isabel however tumbled in by the window. She sidled up to Mr. Stafford, sat on his knee, and wound one arm round his neck. “Jim darling,” she murmured in his ear, “have you any money?”

“Isabel,” said Mr. Stafford, “how often have I told you that I will not be interrupted in the middle of my morning’s work? You come in like a whirlwind, with holes in your stockings

Isabel giggled suddenly. “Never mind, darling, I’ll help you with your sermon. Whereabouts are you? Oh! ’I need not tell you, my friends, the story we all know so well’ Jim, that’s what my tutor calls ‘Redundancy and repetition.’ You know quite well you’re going to tell us every word of it. Darling take its little pen and cross it out so with its own nasty little cross-nibbed J

“What do you mean by saying you want money,” Mr. Stafford hurriedly changed the subject, “and how much do you want? The butcher’s bill came to half a sovereign this week, and I must keep five shillings to take to old Hewitt

“I want pounds and pounds.”

“My dear!” said Mr. Stafford aghast. He took off his spectacles to polish them, and then as he put them on again, “If it’s for that Appleton boy I really can’t allow it. There’s nothing whatever wrong with him but laziness”

“It isn’t for Appleton. It’s for me myself.” Isabel sat up straight, a little flushed. “I’m growing up. Isn’t it a nuisance? I want a new dress! I did think I could carry on till the winter, but I can’t. Could you let me have enough to buy one ready-made? Chapman’s have one in their window that would fit me pretty well. It’s rather dear, but somehow when I make my own they never come right. And Rowsley says I look like a scarecrow, and even Val’s been telling me to put my hair up!”

“Put your hair up, my child? Why, how old are you? I don’t like little girls to be in a hurry to turn into big ones”

“I’m not a little girl,” said Isabel shortly. “I’m nineteen.”

“Nineteen? no, surely not!”

“Twenty next December.”

“Dear me!” said Mr. Stafford, quite overcome. “How time flies!” He set her down from his knee and went to his cash box. “If Val tells you to put your hair up, no doubt you had better do it.” He paused. “I don’t know whether Val said you ought to have a new frock, though? I can’t bear spending money on fripperies when even in our own parish so many people ” Some glimmering perception reached him of the repressed anguish in Isabel’s eyes. “But of course you must have what you need. How much is it?”

“1. 11. 6.”

“Oh, my dear! That seems a great deal.”

“It isn’t really much for a best dress,” said poor Isabel.

“But you mustn’t be extravagant, darling,” said Mr. Stafford tenderly. “I see other girls running about in little cotton dresses or bits of muslin or what not that look very nice much nicer on a young girl than ‘silksand fine array.’ Last time Yvonne came to tea she wore a little frock as simple as a child’s”

“She did,” said Isabel. “She picked it up in a French sale. It was very cheap only 275 francs.”

“Eleven pounds!” Mr. Stafford held up his hands. “My dear, are you sure?”

“Quite,” said Isabel. Mr. Stafford sighed. “I must speak to Yvonne. ‘How hardly shall they...’” He took a note out of his cash box. “Can’t you make that do ?” he was beginning when a qualm of compunction came upon him. After all it was a long time since he had given Isabel any money for herself, and there must be many little odds and ends about a young girl’s clothing that an elderly man wouldn’t understand. He took out a second note and pressed them both hurriedly into Isabel’s palm. “There! now run off and don’t ask me for another penny for the next twelvemonth!” he exclaimed, beaming over his generosity though more than half ashamed of it. “You extravagant puss, you! dear, dear, who’d have a daughter?”

Isabel gave him a rather hasty though warm embrace (she was terribly afraid that his conscience would prick him and that he would take the second note away again), and flew out of the window faster than she had come in. The clock was striking a quarter past one, and she had to scamper down to Chapman’s to buy the dress, and a length of lilac ribbon for a sash, and a packet of bronze hairpins, and be back in time to lay the cloth for two o’clock lunch. If it is only for idle hands that Satan finds mischief, he could not have had much satisfaction out of Isabel Stafford.

Soon after four Mrs. Clowes stepped from her car, shook out her soft flounces, and led the way across the lawn, Lawrence Hyde in attendance. The vicarage was an old-fashioned house too large for the living, its long front, dotted with rosebushes, rising up honey-coloured against the clear green of a beech grove. There are grand houses that one sees at once will never be comfortable, and there are unpretentious houses that promise to be cool in summer and warm in winter and restful all the year round: of such was Chilmark vicarage, sunning itself in the afternoon clearness, while faded green sunblinds filled the interior with verdant shadow, and the smell of sweetbrier and Japanese honeysuckle breathed round the rough-cast walls.

Isabel had laid tea on the lawn, and Mrs. Clowes smiled to herself when she saw seven worn deck chairs drawn up round the table; she was always secretly amused at Isabel in her character of hostess, at the naïve natural confidence with which the young lady scattered invitations and dispensed hospitality. But when Isabel came forward Laura’s covert smile passed into irrepressible surprise. She raised her eyebrows at Isabel, who replied by an almost imperceptible but triumphant nod. In her white and mauve embroidered muslin, her dark hair accurately parted at the side of her head and drawn back into what she called a soup plate of plaits, Isabel no longer threatened to be pretty. Impelled by that singularly pure benevolence which a woman who has ceased to hope for happiness feels for the eager innocence of youth, Laura drew her close and kissed her. “My sweet, I’m so glad,” she whispered. A bright blush was Isabel’s only answer. Then Mrs. Clowes stepped back and indicated her cavalier, very big and handsome in white clothes and a Panama hat: “May I introduce Captain Hyde, Miss Stafford,” with a delicate formality which thrilled Isabel to her finger-tips. Let him see if he would call her a little girl now!

Lawrence recognized Isabel at a glance, but he was not abashed. He scarcely gave her a second thought till he had satisfied himself that Val Stafford was not present. Lawrence smiled, not at all surprised: he had had a presentiment that Val, the modest easy-going Val of his recollections, would be detained at Countisford: too modest by half, if he was shy of meeting an old friend! Rowsley Stafford was doing the honours and came forward to be introduced to Lawrence, a ceremony remarkable only because they both took an instantaneous dislike to each other. Lawrence disliked Rowsley because he was young and well-meaning and the child of a parsonage, and Rowsley disliked Lawrence because a manner which owed some of its serenity to his physical advantages, and his tailor, and his income, irritated the susceptibilities of the poor man’s son.

Poor men’s sons were often annoyed by Lawrence Hyde’s manner. Not so Jack Bendish, sprawling in a deck chair which had no sound pair of notches: not so his wife, Laura’s sister, Yvonne of the Castle, curled up on a moth-eaten tigerskin rug, and clad in raiment of brown and silver which even Mr. Stafford would not have credited to Chapman’s General Drapery and Grocery Stores. Isabel was innocently surprised when the Bendishes found they had met Captain Hyde in town. Laura’s smile was very faintly tinged with bitterness: she knew of that small world where every one meets every one, though she had been barred out of it most of her life, first by her disreputable father and then by the tragedy of her marriage: Rowsley pulled his tooth-brush moustache and said nothing. He was young, but not so young as Isabel, and there were moments when he felt his own footing at the Castle to be vaguely anomalous.

However, the talk ran easily. Lawrence, as was inevitable, sat down by Yvonne Bendish: she did not raise an eyelash to summon him, but it seemed to be a natural law that the rich unmarried man should sit beside her and talk cosmopolitan scandal, and show a discreet appreciation of her clothing and her eyes. Meanwhile the other four conversed with much greater simplicity upon such homely subjects as the coming school treat and the way Isabel had done her hair, Rowsley’s regimental doings, and a recent turn-up between Jack Bendish as deputy M. F. H. and Mr. Morley the Jew.

Bernard Clowes had described Mrs. Jack Bendish as a plain little devil, but as a rule the devilry was more conspicuous than the plainness. She was a tall and extremely slight woman, her features insignificant and her complexion sallow, but her figure indecorously beautiful under its close French draperies. And yet if she had let Lawrence alone he would have gone over to the other camp. How they laughed, three out of the four of them, and what marvellous good tea they put away! The little Stafford girl had a particularly infectious laugh, a real child’s giggle which doubled her up in her chair. Lawrence had no desire to join in the school treat and barnyard conversation, but he would have liked to sit and listen.

“If no one will have any more tea,” said Isabel, jumping up and shaking the crumbs out of her lap, “will you all come and eat strawberries?”

“Isn’t Val coming in?” asked Laura.

“Not till after five. He said we weren’t to wait for him: he was delayed in getting off. He sent his love to you, Laura, and he was very sorry.”

“His love!” said Yvonne Bendish.

“My dear Isabel, I’m sure he didn’t,” said Laura laughing.

“Kind regards then,” said Isabel: “not that it signifies, because we all do love you, darling. Val’s always telling me that if I want to be a lady when I grow up I must model my manners on yours. Not yours, Yvonne.”

“After that the least I can do is to wait and give him his tea when he does appear,” said Laura. “It’s very hot among the strawberry beds, and I’m a little tired: and I haven’t seen Val for days.”

“No more have I,” said Yvonne in her odd drawl, “and I’m tired too.” Mrs. Jack Bendish was made of whipcord: she had been brought up to ride Irish horses over Irish fences and to dance all night, after tramping the moors all day with a gun. “I’ll stay with you and rest. Jack, you run on. Bring me some big ones in a cabbage leaf. And, Captain Hyde, you’ll find them excellent with bread and butter.” By which Lawrence perceived that his interest in the other camp had not gone unobserved, and that was the worst of Yvonne: but and that was the best of Yvonne: there was no tinge of spite in her jeering eyes.

So the sisters remained on the lawn, and Jack Bendish, a perfectly simple young man, walked off with Rowsley to pick a cabbage leaf. Isabel was demureness itself as she followed with Captain Hyde. The embroidered muslin gave her courage, more courage perhaps than if she could have heard his frank opinion of it. “The trailing skirt of the young girl,” said Miss Stafford to herself, “made a gentle frou-frou as she swept over the velvet lawn.” A quoi revent les junes filles? Very innocent was the vanity of Isabel’s dreams. She was not strictly pretty, but she was young and fresh, and the spotless muslin fell in graceful folds round her tall, lissome figure. To the jaded man of the world at her side . . . . Alas for Isabel! The jaded man of the world was a trifle bored: he was easily bored. He liked listening to Miss Stafford’s artless merriment but he had no desire to share in it; what had he to say to a promoted schoolgirl in her Sunday best?

He began politely making conversation. “What a pretty place this is!” It seemed wiser not to refer even by way of apology to the indiscretion of the morning. “You have a beautiful view over the Plain. Rather dreary in winter though, isn’t it?”

“I like it best then,” said Isabel briefly. “Don’t you want any strawberries?” She indicated the netted furrows among which little could be seen of Rowsley and Jack Bendish except their stern ends.

“No, thanks, I had too much tea.” Isabel checked herself on the brink of reminding him that he had eaten only two cucumber sandwiches and a macaroon. In Lawrence Hyde’s society her conversation had not its usual happy flow, she felt tonguetied and missish. “How close you are to the Downs here!” They were following a flagged path between espalier pear trees, and beds of broccoli and carrots and onions, and borders full of old standard roses and lavender and sweet herbs and tall lilies; at the end appeared a wishing gate in a low stone wall, and beyond it, pathless and sunshiny, the southern stretches of the Plain. “Are you a great gardener, Miss Isabel?”

“Some,” said Isabel. “I look after my pet vegetables. The flowers have to look after themselves. My father has eruptions of industry.” She overflowed into a little laugh. “We don’t encourage him in it. He had a bad attack of weeding last spring, and pulled up all my little salads by mistake.” Now that small tale, she reflected, would have tickled Jack Bendish, but Captain Hyde, though he smiled at it dutifully, did not seem to be amused.

“Oh bother you!” Isabel apostrophised him mentally. “You’re not the grandson of a duke anyhow. I expect you would be nicer if you were.”

She folded her arms on the gate and gazed across the Plain. The village below was not far off, but they could see nothing of it, buried as it was in the river-valley and behind a green arras of beech leaves: in every other direction, far as the eye could see, leagues of feathery pale grass besprinkled with blue and yellow flowers went away in ribbed undulations, occasionally rolling up into a crest on which a company of fir trees hung like men on march. The sun was pale and smudged, the sky veiled: on its silken pallor floated, here and there, a blot of dark low cloud, and the clear distances presaged rain.

“May I ?” Lawrence took out his cigarettes. Isabel gave a grudging assent. She could not understand how any one could be willing to taint the sweet summering air that had blown over so many leagues of grass and flowers. “Dare I offer you one?” Lawrence asked, tendering his case. It was of gold, and bore his monogram in diamonds. Isabel eyed it scornfully. Jack Bendish’s was only silver and much scratched and dinted into the bargain. Now Jack Bendish was the grandson of a duke.

“’No thank you,” said Miss Stafford. “I detest smoking.”

To this Lawrence made no reply at all, no doubt, thought Isabel, because he did not consider it worth one. She was proportionally surprised and a trifle flattered when he replaced the cigarette to which he had just helped himself. “’The young girl had not realized her own power. She was only just coming into her woman’s kingdom. Her heart beat faster and a vermilion blush dyed her pale cheek."’ Isabel’s favourite authors were Stevenson and Mr. Kipling, but her mental rubric insisted on clothing itself in the softer style of Molly Bawn.

“I don’t detest other people’s smoking,” she explained in a rather penitent tone.

“Let’s get out on the downs,” said Lawrence. He swung the gate to and fro for her, then took off his hat and strolled slowly by her side through the rustling grass. “Really,” he said, more to himself than to her, “there are places in England that are very well worth while.”

“Worth while what?”

“Er worth coming to see. I suppose there isn’t much shooting to be had except rabbits.” He swung an imaginary gun to his shoulder and sighted it at a quarry which seemed to Isabel to be equally imaginary. “See him? Under that heap of stones left of the beech ring.” Isabel’s vision was both keen and practised, but she saw nothing till the rabbit showed his white scut in a flickering leap to earth.

“You have jolly good eyes,” she conceded, still rather grudgingly.

“So have bunnies, unluckily. Major Clowes tells me there’s pretty good shooting over Wanhope. I suppose your brother looks after it, for of course Clowes can do nothing. It was a great stroke of luck for my cousin, getting hold of a fellow like Val.”

“I don’t know about that. It was a great stroke of luck for Val.”

“I want so much to meet him. I’m disappointed at missing him this afternoon. I remember him perfectly in the army, though he was only a boy then and I wasn’t much more myself. He must be close on thirty now. But when I met him this morning it struck me he hadn’t altered much.” Isabel, looking up eager-eyed, felt faintly and mysteriously chilled. Was there a point of cruelty in Hyde’s smile? as there was now and then in his cousin’s: she had seen Bernard Clowes watching his wife with the same secret glow.

“Val is old for his age,” she said. “He always seems much older than my other brother, although there are only two or three years between them.”

“Probably his spell in the army aged him. It must have been a formative experience.”

This time Isabel had no doubt about it, there was certainly a touch of cruel irony in Hyde’s soft voice. Her breath came fast. “Why do you say that”: she cried “say it like that?”

The smile faded: Lawrence turned, startled out of his self-possession. “Like what?”

“As if you we’re sneering at Val!”

“I? My dear Miss Isabel, aren’t you a little fanciful?”

Isabel supposed so too, on second thoughts: how could any man sneer at a record like Val’s: unless indeed it were with that peculiarly graceless sneer which springs from jealousy? And, little as she liked Captain Hyde, she could not think him weak enough for that. She blushed again, this time without any rubric, and hung her head. “I’m sorry! But you did say it as if you didn’t mean it. Perhaps you think we make too much fuss over Val? But in these sleepy country villages exciting things don’t happen every day. I dare say you’ve had scores of adventures since that time you met Val. But Chilmark hasn’t had any. That makes us remember.”

“My dear child,” said Lawrence with an earnest gentleness foreign to his ordinary manner, “you misunderstood me altogether. I liked your brother very much. Remember, I was there when he won his decoration ” He broke off. An intensely visual memory had flashed over him. Now he knew of whom Isabel had reminded him that morning: she had her brother’s eyes.

“At the very time? Were you really? Do, do, do tell me about it! Major Clowes never will he pretends he can’t remember.”

“Has Val never told you?”

“Hardly any more than was in the official account that he was left between the lines after one of our raids, and went back in spite of his wound to bring in Mr. Dale. He had to wait till after dark?” Lawrence nodded.. “And ’under particularly trying conditions.’ Why was that?”

“Because Dale was so close to the German lines. He was entangled in their wire.”

Isabel shuddered. “It seems so long ago. One can’t understand why such cruelties were ever allowed. Of course they will never be again.” This naïve voice of the younger generation made Lawrence smile. “And Val had to cut their wire?”

“To peel it off Dale, or peel Dale off it what was left of him. He didn’t live more than twenty minutes after he was brought in.”

“Did you know Dale?”

“Not well: he was in my cousin’s company, not in mine.”

“And was Val under fire at the time?”

“Under heavy fire. The Boches were sending up starshells that made the place as light as day.”

“I can’t understand how Val could do it with his broken arm.”

“His arm wasn’t broken when he cut their wires.”

“Oh! When was it then?”

Hyde flicked with his stick at the airy heads of grass that rose up thin-sown out of a burnished carpet of lady’s slipper. His manner was even but his face was dark. “He had it splintered by a revolver shot on his way home, near our lines.”

“Oh! But the Army doctors said the shot must have been fired at close quarters?”

“There, you see I’m not much of an authority, am I? No doubt, if they said so, they were right. The fact is I was knocked out myself that afternoon with a rifle bullet in the ribs. It was a hot corner for the Wintons and Dorsets.”

“Were you? I’m sorry.” Isabel ran her eyes with a touch of whimsical solicitude over Hyde’s tall easy figure and the exquisite keeping of his white clothes. Difficult to connect him with the bloody disarray of war! “Were you too left lying between the lines?”

“With a good many others, English and German.

“There was a fellow near me that hadn’t a scratch. He was frightened mad with fear: he lay up in the long grass and wept most of the day. I never hated any one so much in my life. I could have shot him with pleasure.”

“German, of course?”

Hyde smiled. “German, of course.”

“If he had been English he would have deserved to be shot,” said Isabel briefly: then, reverting to a subject in which she was far more deeply interested, “Rowsley my second brother said I wasn’t to cross-examine you: but it was a great temptation, because one never can get anything out of Val. And after all we’ve the right to be proud of him! Even then, when every one was so brave, you would say, wouldn’t you, that Val earned his distinction? It really was what the Gazette called it, ’conspicuous gallantry’?”

“It was a daring piece of work,” said Lawrence, reddening to his hair. He fought down a sensation so unfamiliar that he could scarcely put a name to it, and forced himself on: “We were all proud of him and we none of us forget it. Don’t tell him I said so, though. It isn’t etiquette. You won’t think I’m trying to minimize what Val did, will you, if I say that we who were through the fighting saw so many horrible and ghastly things . . .” Again his voice failed. He was aware of Isabel’s bewilderment, but he was seeing more ghosts than he had seen in all the intervening years of peace, and they came between him and the sunlit landscape and Isabel’s young eyes. War! always war! human bodies torn to rags in a moment, and the flowers of the field wet with a darker moisture than rain: the very smell of the trenches was in his nostrils, their odour of blood and decay. What in heaven’s name had brought it all back, and, stranger still, what had moved him to speak of it and to betray feelings whose very existence was unknown to him and which he had never betrayed before?

The silence was brief though to Lawrence it seemed endless. He drove the ghosts back to quarters and finished quietly: “Well, we won’t talk about that, it’s not a pleasant subject. Only give Val my love and tell him if he doesn’t look me up soon I shall come and call on him. We’re much too old friends to stand on ceremony.”

“All right, I will,” said Isabel.

There was a shrub of juniper close by, and she felt under its sharp branches. “Do you like honeysuckle?” She held up a fresh sprig fragrant with its pale horns, which she had tracked to covert by its scent. Lawrence was not given to wearing buttonholes, but he understood the friendly and apologetic intention and inclined his broad shoulder for Miss Stafford to pass the stem through the lapel of his coat. Isabel had not intended to pin it in for him, but she was generally willing to do what was expected of her. She took a pin from her own dress (there were plenty in it), and fastened the flower deftly on the breast of Captain Hyde’s white jacket.

And so standing before him, her head bent over her task, she unwittingly left Lawrence free to observe the texture of her skin, bloomed over with down like a peach, and the curves of her young shoulders, a little inclined to stoop, as young backs often are in the strain of growth, but so firm, so fresh, so white under the thin stuff of her bodice: below her silken plaits, on the nape of her neck, a curl or two of hair grew in close rings, so fine that it was almost indistinguishable from its own shadow. Swiftly, without warning, Lawrence was aware of a pleasurable commotion in his veins, a thrill that shook through him like a burst of gay music. This experience was not novel, he had felt it three or four times before in his life, and on the spot, while it was sending gentle electric currents to his finger-tips, he was able to analyse its origin item, to warm weather and laziness after the strain of his Chinese journey, so much: item, to Isabel’s promise of beauty, so much: item, to the disparity between her age and his own, to her ignorance and immaturity, the bloom on the untouched fruit, so much more. But there was this difference between the present and previous occasions when he had fallen or thought of falling in love, that he desired no victory: no, it was he and not Isabel who was to capitulate, leaning his forehead upon her young hand. . . . And he had never seen her till that morning, and the child was nineteen, the daughter of a country vicarage, brought up to wear calico and to say her prayers! more, she was Val Stafford’s sister, and she loved her brother. Lawrence gave himself a gentle shake. At six and thirty it is time to put away childish things. “Thank you very much. Is that Mrs. Clowes calling us?”

It was Laura Clowes and Yvonne Bendish, and Lawrence, as he strolled back with Isabel to the garden gate, had an uneasy suspicion that the episode of the honeysuckle had been overseen. Laura was graver than usual, while Yvonne had a sardonic spark in her eye. “I’m afraid it’s no use waiting any longer, Isabel,” said Laura.

“What do you think, Lawrence? It’s after six o’clock.”

“Hasn’t Val come?” said Isabel.

“No, he must have been kept at Countisford. It’s a long ride for him on such a hot day. Perhaps Mrs. Bishop made him stay to tea.”

“As if he would stay with any old Mrs. Bishop when he knew you were coming here!” said Isabel scornfully. “Poor old Val, I shan’t tell him how you misjudged him, he’d be so hurt. But I’ll send him down, shall I, to see you and Captain Hyde after supper? Tired? Oh no, he’s never too tired to go to Wanhope.”

She kissed Laura, gave Lawrence her sweetest friendly smile, and returned to the lawn, where Yvonne had apparently taken root upon her tigerskin. Isabel heard Rowsley say, “Make her shut up, Jack,” but before she could ask why Yvonne was to be shut up the daughter of Lilith had opened fire on the daughter of Eve. “And what did you think of Lawrence Hyde?” Mrs. Bendish asked, stretching herself out like a snake and examining Isabel out of her pale eyes, much the colour of an unripe gooseberry. “Was he very attractive? Oh Isabel! oh Isabel! I should not have thought this of one so young.”

Isabel considered the point. “I can’t understand him,” she said honestly. “I liked parts of him. He isn’t so so homogeneous as most people are.

“Did he ask you for the honeysuckle?”

“No, I gave it to him for a peace offering. I hurt his feelings, and afterwards I was sorry and wanted to make it up with him. But would you have thought he had any feelings? any, that is, that anything I said would hurt?”

“Certainly not,” from Rowsley.

“Any woman can hurt any man,” said Yvonne. “But, of course, you aren’t a woman, Isabel. What was the trouble?”

“Oh, something about the war.”

“No, my child, it wasn’t about the war. It was something that stung up his vanity or his self-love. Lawrence isn’t a sentimentalist like Jack or Val.” Here Jack Bendish got as far as an artless “Oh, I say!” but his wife paid no attention. “Lawrence never took the war seriously.”

“But he did,” insisted Isabel. “He coloured all over his face

She paused, realizing that Mrs. Bendish, under her mask of scepticism, was agog with curiosity. Isabel was not fond of being drawn out. Lawrence had given her his confidence, and she valued it, for with all her ignorance of society she had seen too much of plain human nature to suppose that he was often taken off his guard as he had been by her: and was she going to expose him to Yvonne’s lacerating raillery? A thousand times no! “I misunderstood something he said about Val,” she continued with scarcely a break, and falling back on one of those explanations that deceive the sceptical by their economy of truth. “It was stupid of me, and awkward for him, so I had to apologize.”

“I see. Come, Jack.” Yvonne rose to her feet, more like a snake than ever in her flexibility and swiftness, and held Isabel to her for a moment, her arm round her young friend’s waist. “But if you pin any more buttonholes into Captain Hyde’s coat,” the last low murmur was only for Isabel’s ear, “he will infallibly kiss you: so now you are forewarned and can choose whether or no you will continue to pay him these little attentions.”

Isabel was not disturbed. She had early formed the habit of not attending to Mrs. Bendish, and she unwound herself without even changing colour.

“You always remind me of Nettie Hills at the Clowes’s lodge,” she retorted. “Mrs. Hills says she’s that flighty in the way she carries on, no one would believe what a good sensible girl she is under all her nonsense, and walks out with her own young man as regular as clockwork.”