Isabel also sprang up, changing from woman to child as Lawrence changed from deference to patronage.  Their manner to each other when alone was always different from their manner before an audience.  But this change, deliberate in Lawrence, had hitherto been instinctive and almost unconscious in Isabel.  It was not so now, she fled to Val and to her younger self for refuge.  What a fanfaronade!  Why couldn’t Captain Hyde have put the rings in his pocket?  But no, it must all be done with an air—­and what an air!  Rings worth thousands—­historic mementoes—­stripped off and tossed away to please—!  And at that Isabel, enchanted and terrified, bundled the entire dialogue into the cellars of her mind and locked the doors on it.  Later,—­later,—­when one was alone!  “Oh, Val, say I may go!” she cried, clasping her hands on Val’s arm, so cool and firm amid a spinning world.

[Footnote]

What actually happened later that afternoon was that Isabel, who had a practical mind, spent three-quarters of an hour on the moor hunting for the rings.  The turquoise she found, conspicuous on a patch of smooth turf:  the other was never recovered.

[End of Footnote]

“You may,” said Val laughing.  He disliked the scheme, but was incapable of refusing Laura Clowes:  he gave her Isabel as he would have given her the last drops of his blood, if she had asked for them in that low voice of hers, and with those sweet eyes that never seemed to anticipate refusal.  There are women—­not necessarily the most beautiful of their sex—­to whom men find it hard to refuse anything.  And, consenting, it was not in Val to consent with an ill grace.  “Certainly you may, if Captain Hyde is kind enough to take you!” Stafford’s lips, finely cut and sensitive, betrayed the sarcastic sense of humour which he ruled out of his voice:  perhaps the less said about kindness the better!  “But do look over her wardrobe first, Laura:  I’m never sure whether Isabel is grown up or not, but she could hardly figure at Hadow’s in her present easy-going kit—­”

He stopped, because Isabel was trying to waltz him round the lawn.  In her reaction from a deeper excitement, she was as excited as a child.  She released Val soon and hugged Laura Clowes instead, while Lawrence, looking on with his wintry smile, wondered whether she would have extended the same civility to him if she had known how much he desired it. . . .  There were moments when he hated Isabel.  Was she never going to grow up?

Not at present, apparently.  “What must I wear, Laura?  Do people wear evening dress?  Where shall we sit?  What time shall we get back?  How are you going?  What time must I be ready?  Will you have dinner before you go or take sandwiches with you?”—­how long the patter of questions would have run on it is hard to say, if the extreme naivete of the last one had not drowned them in universal laughter, and Isabel in crimson.