“Oh Val!—­ Don’t be angry, or not with Lawrence anyhow, it wasn’t his fault.”

Isabel disengaged herself but without confusion.  Her brother watched her in increasing surprise.  Rosy and sparkling, she seemed to have grown from child to woman in an hour, as after a late spring the first hot day brings a million buds into leaf.

“Are you startled?” she asked, holding up her cheek for a kiss.

“Not so much so as I should have been twenty-four hours ago.  No, I didn’t guess—­not a bit; I suppose brothers never expect people to want to marry their sisters.  We know too much about you.”

“Better run off to the nursery, Isabel,” said Lawrence.  Isabel made him a little smiling curtsey eloquent of her disdain—­it was so like Captain Hyde to be saucy before Val!—­and slipped away.  When Lawrence returned after holding open the door for her, he found a certain difficulty in meeting Val’s eyes.

“And this then is the mysterious attraction that has kept you at Wanhope all the summer?  Wonderful!  What will Mrs. Jack say?  But I suppose nineteen, for forty, has a charm of its own.”

Lawrence was not forty.  But he refused to be drawn.  “She is very beautiful.”

“Oh, very,” Val was nothing if not cordial.  “But her face is her fortune.  I needn’t ask if you can keep her in the state to which she’s accustomed,” his eye wandered over the dilapidated vicarage furniture, “or whether your attentions are disinterested.  Evidently you’re one of those men who like their wives to be dependent on them—­ Dear me!”

“Damn the money!” said Lawrence at white heat.  “Jew I may be, but it’s you and Isabel that harp on it, not I.”

“Come, come!” Val arched his eyebrows.  “So sorry to ruffle you, but these questions are in all the etiquette books and some one has to ask them.  If you could look on me as Isabel’s father—?”

It was too much.  Angry as he was, Lawrence began to laugh.  “No, I won’t look on you as Isabel’s father,” he had regained the advantage of age and position, neutralized till now by Val’s cooler self-restraint.  “I won’t look on you as anything but a brother-in-law; a younger brother of my own, Val, if you can support the relation.  Won’t you start fresh with me?  I’ve not given you much cause to think well of me up to now, but I love Isabel, and I’ll do my best to make her happy.  I might find forgiveness difficult if I were you, but then,” for his life he could not have said whether he was in earnest or chaffing Val, “I’m a Jew of Shylock’s breed and you’re a Christian.”

“But, my dear fellow, what is there to forgive?  We’re only too delighted and grateful for the honour done us:  it’s a brilliant match, of course, far better than she could expect to make.”  A duller man than Lawrence could not have missed the secret silken mischief.  “And to me, to all of us, you’re more than kind; it’s nice to feel that instead of losing a sister I shall gain a brother.”