“Oh no, thank you.”

“Cold?”

“Not now.”

“Frightened?”

“A little.”

“You wouldn’t rather I left you for a little while?”

Isabel almost imperceptibly shook her head, but with a shade of mockery in her smile which prevented Lawrence from taking her in his arms.  “Am I an unsatisfactory wife?  Will you soon be tired of me?  No, not yet,” she said, moving away from him to put down her gloves and muff.  “I’ve hardly had time to thank you for my presents yet.  Oh Lawrence, how you spoil me!” She held up her watch to admire the lettering on its Roman enamel. “‘I.H.’  Does that stand for me—­am I really Isabel Hyde?  And are those sapphires mine, and can I drink my tea out of this roseleaf Dresden cup?  It does seem strange that saying a few words and writing one’s name in a book should make so much difference.”

“Regretful?”

“A little oppressed, that’s all.  I shall soon get used to it.  If you were not you I should hate it.  But there’s something essentially generous and careless in you, Lawrence, that makes it easy to take from you.  Come here.”  He came to her.  “Oh, I’ve made you blush!” said Isabel, naively surprised.  Under her rare and unexpected praise he had coloured against his will.  “Oh foolish one!” She kissed him sweetly.  “Lawrence, are you sorry Val died?” Lawrence freed himself and turned away.  It was six months since Val’s death, but he still could not bear to think of it and he had scarcely spoken of it to Isabel.

There had been no protracted farewell for Val.  He had died in Lawrence’s arms on the steps of Wanhope without recovering consciousness, while Verney stood by helpless, and Isabel, by a stroke of irony, tried to convince poor agonized Laura Clowes that the law should not touch her husband.  It had not done so.  He had been saved mainly by the unscrupulous concerted perjury of Lawrence and Selincourt, who swore that Val had stumbled and fallen by accident with the dagger in his hand, while Verney confined himself to drily agreeing that the wound might have been self-inflicted.  In the absence of any contrary evidence the lie was allowed to pass, but perhaps it would hardly have done so if it had not been universally taken for a half-truth.  The day before the inquest there appeared in the Gazette a laconic notice that Second Lieutenant Valentine Ormsby Stafford, late of the Dorchester Regiment, had been deprived of his distinction on account of circumstances recently brought to light.  After that, no need to ask why Val should have had a dagger in his hand!  A jury who had known Val and his father before him were not anxious to press the case; and perhaps even the coroner was secretly grateful for evidence which spared him the pain of calling Mr. Stafford.