Val came across the dark, cool lawn and climbed over the window sill.  A shabby room, large and low:  a faded paper, grey toning to blue:  a carpet of faded roses on a grey ground:  the shaded Dresden lamp and roselit supper table shining like an island in a pool of shadow, and those two beloved heads, both so dark and smooth and young, tam cara capita!  Neither of them suspected that Val was unhappy.  His feeling for them was more fatherly than fraternal, and Rowsley, strange to say, fell in with Val’s attitude, coming to his brother for money as naturally as most young men go to their parents.  Val sat at the head of the table because Mr. Stafford could not carve.  “There!” said Isabel, giving him his plate.  “Mustard?  I’ve just made it so you needn’t look to see if it’s fresh.  Watercress:  I picked it myself.  Lettuce.  Cream and vinegar and sugar.  Beer.  Now do you feel happy?  Lord love you, dear, I like to see you eat.”

She sat on the arm of Mr. Stafford’s mahogany chair.  “What time do you want breakfast?  Seven o’clock?  Major Clowes wouldn’t come down at seven if he were your agent.  Can you get back to tea tomorrow?  Laura may bring the cousin up to tea with her and she wants him to meet you.”

“Very good of her.  Why?”

“Oh, because he was in the Army too and all through the war.  He went out with the first hundred thousand.  He’s much older than you are—­the same age as Laura.  Oh, wait a minute!” exclaimed Isabel in the tone in which a Frenchwoman says Tenez.  I forgot.  She thinks you must have met him, Val.”

“Possibly,” said Val.

“Was he in the Dorchesters?” asked Rowsley—­much more interested than his brother, no doubt because he was not so hungry as Val, who was giving all his attention to his supper.

“No, in the Winchesters,” said Isabel.  “Do I mean the Winchesters, Val?  What was Major Clowes’ old regiment?”

“Clowes was in the Wintons.”

Isabel nodded.  “Then so was the cousin.  And Laura says he was out there when the Wintons were in the next bit of trench north of the Dorchesters.  He was there when—­when you were wounded.”  Such was Val Stafford’s modesty that in the family circle it was not in etiquette to refer in other terms to that famous occasion.

“I don’t remember any fellow named Clowes and I never knew Bernard Clowes had a cousin out there,” said Val, mixing himself a salad.

“Oh, his name isn’t Clowes.  It’s Ryde or Pride or something like that.  I’m sorry to be so vague, but Jack Bendish and Yvonne and Mrs. Morley were all talking at once.  Lawrence Pied—­Fried—­”

“Lawrence Hyde?”

“Yes, that’s it!  Then you really do remember him?”

“Er—­yes.  Is that lamp smoking, Rowsley?  You might turn it down a trifle, I can’t reach.”

“Let me, let me?—­ What was he like?”

“Who—­Hyde?  Oh,” said Val vaguely, “he was like the rest of us —­very tired.”