“Tired?” echoed Isabel with a blank face, “but, Val darling, he couldn’t have been only tired!  What should you think he was like when he wasn’t tired?”

“That is a question I have occasionally asked myself,” Val answered with his faint indecipherable smile.  “My dear child, I only saw him once or twice.  He was a senior captain and commanded his company.  I was a very junior lieutenant.”

“Still he was there at the time,” reflected Isabel.  “O Rose! if he’s anything like nice, which is almost past praying for in Major Clowes’ cousin, let’s beguile him into the gooseberry bushes and make him tell us all about it!  Val is very dear to his family, but no one, however tenderly attached to him, could call him a brilliant raconteur.  Now Mr. Hyde won’t have any modest scruples.  Val, if there is a slug in that lettuce I wish you would say so.  It would hurt my feelings less than for you to sit looking at it in a stony silence.  Was he good-looking?”

“Possibly he might be,” said Val, “when he scraped the dirt off.” 
 After a moment he added, “He was very decent to me.”

“Was he?  Then he was nice?”

“Gnat,” said Rowsley from the middle of his third egg.  Isabel rounded him indignantly.

“I’m not gnatting!  I’m not asking Val anything about himself, am I?  Val can’t possibly mind telling me about another man in another regiment.  You eat your eggs, there’s a good boy, before they get cold.—­ Laura says the Dorchesters dined the Winchesters once when they were in billets.  Was that when you and Mr. Hyde were there?”

“Captain Hyde,” Val corrected his young sister.  “Yes, we both graced the festive board.  It was too festive for me.  We had Buszard’s soup and curried chicken and real cream, and more champagne than was good for us.  But it was not on that occasion that Hyde was so decent to me.  The day I—­the day Dale went down—­” Rowsley nodded to him as he raised his glass of beer to his lips—­“thank you, Rose.—­ As I was saying, that evening I ran across Hyde between the lines.  The Dorsets and Wintons had gone over the top together, and he had been left behind with a bullet in his chest.  I was done to the world, but he had some brandy left and shared it with me.  If it had not been for Hyde I should never have brought Dale in.”

“Well, I’ve never heard that before,” said Rowsley to his fourth egg.

Isabel was silent, and her eyes in the shadow of a momentary gravity were the eyes of a woman and not of a child.  She raised them to look out at the evening sky, indigo blue against the lamplit interior, or faintly primrose in the west, and wondered for the thousandth time why it was still such an effort to Val to refer to his brief military experience.  Soft country noises came in, peaceful and soothing:  the short shrill shriek of a bat, the rustle of a branch of rose-leaves moving like a hand over the window panes, a faint breathing of wind from the moor.  Surely the scar of war ought to be healed by now!  Isabel kept these thoughts to herself:  young as she was, her solitary life—­for a woman alone among men is always to some extent solitary—­had trained her to a clear perception of what had better not be said.