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

“No.”

She laughed.  “Never mind, you’ll soon find some one else.  What play is it?”

“‘She Promised to Marry.’”

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

“Madeleine Wild and Peter Sennet.”

“Have you ever seen them?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No fear!  I encourage trade.  I’ve never touched second rate stuff in my life.”

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