Dreamlike the run through the warm September landscape:  dreamlike the slip of country platform, where, while Lawrence took their tickets, she and Laura walked up and down and fingered the tall hollyhocks flowering upward in quilled rosettes of lemon-yellow and coral red, like paper lanterns lit by a fairy lamplighter on a spiral stair:  and most dreamlike of all the discovery that the Exeter express had been flagged for them and that she was expected to precede Laura into a reserved first class carriage.  It was not more than once or twice in a year that Isabel went by train, and she had never travelled but third class in her life.  How smoothly life runs for those who have great possessions!  How polite the railway staff were!  The station master himself held open the door for the Wanhope party.  Now she knew Mr. Chivers very well, but in all previous intercourse one finger to his cap had been enough for young Miss Isabel.  Certainly it was agreeable, this hothouse atmosphere.  “Shall you feel cold?” Lawrence asked, and Isabel, murmuring “No, thank you,” blushed in response to the touch of formality in his manner.  She felt what women often feel in the early stages of a love affair, that he had been nearer to her when he was not there, than now when they were together in the presence of a third person.  She had grown shy and strange before this careless composed man lounging opposite her with his light overcoat thrown open and his crush hat on his knees, conventionally polite, his long legs stretched out sideways to give her and Laura plenty of room.

And Lawrence on the journey neither spoke to her nor watched her, though Isabel shone in borrowed plumes.  There had been no time to buy clothes, and so Val, though grudgingly, had allowed Laura and Yvonne to ransack their shelves and presses for Cinderella’s adornment.  But one glance had painted her portrait for him, tall and slender in a long sealskin coat of Yvonne’s which was rulled and collared and flounced with fur, her glossy hair parted on one side and drawn back into what she called a soup-plate of plaits.  Once only he directly addressed her, when Laura loosened her own sables.  “Do undo your coat, won’t you?  It’s hot tonight for September.”

“I’m not hot, thank you,” said Isabel stiffly:  but slowly, as if against her will, she opened the collar of her coat and pushed it back from her young neck and the crossed folds of her lace gown.  The gown was very old, it had indeed belonged to Laura Selincourt:  it was because Laura loved its soft, graceful, dateless lines that it had survived so long.  She had seized on it with her unerring tact:  this was right for Isabel, this dim transparency of rosepoint modelling itself over the immature slenderness of nineteen:  and she and her maid Catherine and Mrs. Bendish had spent patient hours trying it on and modifying it to suit the fashion of the day.  Laura had refused to impose upon Isabel either her own modish elegance or Yvonne’s effect of the arresting and bizarre.  “Isn’t she almost too slight for it?” Yvonne had asked, and Laura for all answer had hummed a little French song—­