Except in Chilmark, the scandal scarcely ran its nine days, but there of course it raged like a fire, and no one was much surprised when the vicar resigned his living and crept away to a bed-sittingroom in Museum Street, a broken old man, to spend the brief remainder of his life among black letter texts and incunabula.  He could have borne any sin in the Decalogue less hardly than a breach of the military oath.  He stopped Isabel, Rowsley, Lawrence himself when they tried to plead for Val.  “I am not angry,” he said feebly.  “If my son were alive I wouldn’t shut my door on him.  But it’s better as it is.”  He even tried to persuade Isabel to break with Lawrence.  “Captain Hyde is an honourable man and no doubt considers himself bound to you, so you mustn’t wait for him to release himself.  It is very sad for you, my dear, but you belong to a disgraced family now and you must suffer with the rest of us.”  Isabel agreed, and returned her engagement ring.  Followed a rather fiery scene, in which Lawrence lost his temper, and Isabel wept:  and finally Mr. Stafford, finding Lawrence obdurate, broke down and owned that his one last wish was to see his daughter happily married.  He refused to take her to Bloomsbury.  She stayed with Rowsley or at the Castle till Lawrence brought her to Farringay.

So there were changes at Chilmark, for the parish went to a hot-tempered Welshman with a wife and six children, and Wanhope was let to an American steel magnate, and Mrs. Jack Bendish, always mischievous when she was unhappy, embroiled them with each other first and then quarrelled with both.  Yes, Wanhope was let:  a fortnight after Val’s death Major Clowes went by car to Cornwall with his wife for a change of air after the shock.  He was reported to have stood the journey very well, but Laura’s letters were not expansive.

Nor was Isabel:  nor any other of those who had been eyewitnesses of the tragedy at Wanhope.  The memory of it cast a shadow and a silence.  Lawrence had never discussed it with Isabel; nor with Selincourt, except in a hurried whispered interchange of notes to avoid discrepancy in their evidence; nor with Bernard . . . the murderer.  Since the night when he carried Val dead over the vicarage threshold Lawrence had not seen his cousin.  He had seen Laura and tried to comfort her, but what could one say?  It was murder.  Had it not been for Laura he would have left Clowes to stand his trial.  Even for her sake he would not have kept the secret if Rowsley, to whom alone it was revealed, had not given his leave, in the dim blinded room where revenge and anger seemed small things, and Val’s last words, almost unremarked at the time, took on the solemn force of a dying injunction.  The grey placidity of Val’s closed eyelids and crossed hands was the last memory that Lawrence would have chosen to evoke on his wedding night.