call it.  Under the left breast, eh?” He drew it again and held it poised and pointing at his cousin.  “Come, even I could cut your heart out with a gem of a blade like that.”  Lawrence held himself lightly erect, his big frame stiffening from head to foot and the pupils of his eyes dilating till the irids were blackened.  “Call Laura.”  Bernard sheathed the dagger again and laid it down.  “She’s out there snipping away at the roses.  Why can’t she leave ’em to Parker?  She’s always messing about out there dirtying her hands, and then she comes in and paws me.  Call her in.”

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

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

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