And what dreams they were, oh! what would Val say to them?—­And yet again after all were they so wicked?—­They were incredibly naif and innocent, and so dim that within twenty-four hours Isabel was to look back on them as a woman looks back on her childhood.  She was not ignorant of the mysteries of birth and death.  She had lived all her life among the poor, and knew many things which are not included in school curricula, such as the gentle art of keeping children’s hair clean, how to divide a four-roomed cottage between a man and wife and six children and a lodger, and what to say when shown “a beautiful corpse”:  but she had never had a lover of her own.  There were no marriageable men in Chilmark—­there never are in an English village—­and she was too young for Rowsley’s brother officers, or they were too young for her.  She had dreamed of fairy princes (blases-men-of-the-world, mostly in the Guards or the diplomatic service), but it was never precisely Isabel Stafford whom they clasped to their hearts—­no, it was LaSignora Isabella, the star of Covent Garden, or the Lady Isabel de Stafford, a Duke’s daughter in disguise.  And Lawrence came to her in the mantle of these patrician ghosts.

But—­and at this point Isabel hid her face on her arm—­he was no ghost:  he knew what he wanted and he meant to have it:  and it was a far cry from visionary Heroes to Lawrence Hyde in the flesh, son of a Jew, smelling of cigar-smoke, and taking hold of her with his large, fair, overmanicured hands.  A far cry even from Val or Jack Bendish:  from the cool, mannered Englishman to the hot Oriental blood.  When people were engaged they often kissed each other . . . but when it came to imagining oneself . . . one’s head against that thick tweed . . . no . . . it must be one of the things that are safe to do but dangerous to dream of doing.  Oh, never, never!—­But she had been trained in sincerity:  and was this cry sincere?  Her mind was chaos.

And yet after all why dangerous?  Even Laura, Val’s adored Laura, had been engaged twice before she married Major Clowes:  as for Yvonne, Isabel felt sure she had been kissed many times, and not by Jack Bendish only.  Such things happen, then! in real life, not only in books.  As for the cigars and the valet . . . and Val’s warnings . . . one can’t have all one wants in this world!  It contains no ideal heroes:  what was it Yvonne had once said?  “Every marriage is either a delusion or a compromise.”  And Isabel had shortcomings enough of her own:  she was irritable, lazy, selfish:  read novels when she ought to have been at her lessons:  left household jobs undone in the certainty that Val, however tired he was, would do them for her:  small sins, but then her temptations were small!  Take it by and large, she was probably no better than Captain Hyde except for want of opportunity.  And how he would laugh if he heard her say so!