“A pipe,” said Val, going on one knee to pick up the scattered pack.  “I looked in to see how you were getting on.  Aren’t you going to bed?”

“Not before they come in.”

“Nor will Jimmy, I left him sitting up for Isabel.  You’re both of you very silly, you’ll be dead tired tomorrow, and what’s the object of it?”

“To make sure they do come in,” Bernard explained with a broad grin.  Val sprang up:  intolerable, this reflection of his own fear in Bernard’s distorting mirror!  “Ha ha!  Suppose they didn’t?  Laura was rather fond of larks before she married me.  She was, I give you my word—­she and the other girl.  You wouldn’t think it of Laura, would you?  Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.  But she might like a fling for a change.  Who’d blame her?  I’m no good as a husband, and Lawrence is a picked specimen.  Quelle type, eh?”

“Very good-looking.”

“‘Very good-looking!’” Bernard mocked at him.  “You and your Army vocabulary!  And I’m a nice chap, and Laura’s quite a pretty woman, and this is a topping knife, isn’t it, and life’s a jolly old beano—­ Pity I can’t get out of it, by the by:  if physiology is the basis of marriage, those two would run well in harness.”

“There’s an otter in the river,” remarked Val, examining the little dagger, the same that Lawrence had given Bernard.  “I heard him from the bridge.  They come down from the upper reaches.  Remind me to tell Jack, he’s always charmed to get a day’s sport with his hounds.”  He laid the dagger on a side-table.

“Have one of my cigars?  You can’t afford cigars, can you? poor devil!  They’re on that shelf.  Not those:  they’re Hyde’s.”  Val put back the box as if it had burnt his fingers.  “Leaves his things about as if the place were a hotel!” grumbled Major Clowes.  “That’s one of his books.  Pick it up.  What is it?” Val read out the title.  “Poetry?  Good Lord deliver us!  Do you read poetry, Val?”

“I occasionally dip into Tennyson,” Val replied, settling himself in an easy chair.  “I can’t understand modern verse as a rule, it’s too clever for me, and the fellows who write it always seem to go in for such gloomy subjects.  I don’t like gloomy books, I like stuff that rests and refreshes you.  There are enough sad things in life without writing stories about them.  I can read the ‘Idylls of the King,’ but I can’t read Bernard Shaw.”

“Nor anybody else,” said Bernard.  He fixed his eyes on Val:  eyes like his cousin’s in form and colour, large, and so black under their black lashes that the pupil was almost indistinguishable from the iris, but smouldering in a perpetual glow, while Hyde’s were clear and indifferent.  “You’re a good sort to have come down to look after me.  I don’t feel very brash tonight.  Oh Val! oh Val!  I know I’m a brute, a coarse-minded, foul-mouthed brute.  I usedn’t to be.  When I was twenty-five, if any man had said before me what I say of Laura, I’d have kicked him out of his own house.  Why don’t you kick me?”