Mr. Stafford, by temperament and training a member of the Church Militant, clearly felt a trifle disappointed, but he had little petty vanity and accepted Val’s amendment without a murmur.  “Very well, if you think you can do it better!  I don’t care who does it so long as it’s done.”  The clock struck.  “Half past eleven is that?  Isabel can’t be home before four.  Dear me, how I hate these ridiculous hours, turning night into day!” As some correspondents put the point of a letter into a postscript, so the vicar in returning to his Church Times revealed the peculiar sting that was working in his mind.  “And I don’t—­ I do not like Isabel to make one of that trio—­in view of what’s being said.”

“She is with Mrs. Clowes,” said Val shortly, and colouring all over his face.  Fling enough mud and some of it is sure to stick!  If his unworldly father could think Laura, though innocent, so far compromised that Isabel was not safe in her care, what were other people saying?  Val got up.  “I shall walk down and smoke a pipe with Clowes.  He won’t go to bed till they come in.”

The beechen way was dark and steep; roosting birds blundered out from overhead with a sleepy clamour of alarm-notes and a great rustle of leaf-brushed wings; one could have tracked Val’s course by the commotion they made.  On the footbridge dark in alder-shadow he lingered to enjoy the cool woodland air and lulling ripple underfoot.  Not a star pierced to that black water, it might have been unfathomably deep; and though the village street was only a quarter of a mile away the night was intensely quiet, for all Chilmark went to bed after closing time.  It was not often that Val, overworked and popular, tasted such a profound solitude.  Not a leaf stirred:  no one was near:  under golden stars it was chilling towards one of the first faint frosts of the year:  and insensibly Val relaxed his guard:  a heavy sigh broke from him, and he moved restlessly, indulging himself in recollection as a man who habitually endures pain without wincing will now and then allow himself the relief of defeat.

For it is a relief not to pretend any more nor fight:  to let pain take its way, like a slow tide invading every nerve and flooding every recess of thought, till one is pierced and penetrated by it, married to it, indifferent so long as one can drop the mask of that cruel courage which exacts so many sacrifices.  Val was still only twenty-nine.  Forty years more of a life like this! . . .  Lawrence had once compared him to a man on the rack.  But, though Lawrence knew all, Val had never relaxed the strain before him:  was incapable of relaxing it before any spectator.  He needed to be not only alone, but in the dark, hidden even from himself:  and even so no open expression was possible to him, not a movement after the first deep sigh:  it was relief enough for him to be sincere with himself and own that he was unhappy.  But why specially unhappy now?