“Nothing in what I’ve heard of your married life is ignominious for you.  So you brought up Rendell’s child?  Essentially generous . . . .  Kiss me.”  Isabel’s pale beauty glowed like a flame.  A Christian malagre lui and very much ashamed of it, Lawrence gave her the lightest of butterfly kisses, one on either eyelid.  “Oh, I suppose you’ll say I am—­what was it?—­towardly too,” murmured Isabel.  “Don’t you want to kiss me?” He shook his head.  Isabel, a trifle startled, opened her eyes, but was apparently satisfied, for she shut them again hurriedly and let her arm fall across them.  “We’ll go and see Rendell’s boy tomorrow.  You shall take me.  I can say what I like to you now, can’t I? . . .  Shall you like to have one of our own?”

“Isabel, Isabel!”

“But it’s perfectly proper now we’re married!  Oh Lawrence, it’ll so soon come to seem commonplace—­ I want to taste the strangeness of it while I’m still near enough to Isabel Stafford to realize what a miracle it’ll be.  Our own! it seems so strange to say ‘ours.’”

“I don’t want any brats to come between you and me.”

“Aren’t you always in your secret soul afraid of life?”

“Afraid of life—­I?”

“You have no faith . . .  Everything we possess—­your happiness, our love, the children you’ll give me—­don’t you hold it all at the sword’s point?  You’re afraid of death or change?”

“Yes.”

“How frank you are!” Isabel smiled fleetingly.  “Aren’t there any locked doors?—­no?—­I may go wherever I like ?—­Lawrence, are you sorry Val’s dead?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, not Val again!”

“One locked door after all?”

“I was fond of him,” said Lawrence with difficult passion.  “He told me once that I broke his life, it was no one’s doing but mine that he had to go through the crucifixion of that last hour at Wanhope, and he was killed for me.”  He left her and went to the window, flung it up and stood looking out into the night.  “I’d have given my life to save him.  I’d give it now—­now.”

“I heard from Laura this morning.”

“I wonder she dared write to you.”

“Major Clowes is wonderfully better.  He drives out with her every day and mixes with other people in the sanatorium and makes friends with them.  He’s been sleeping better than he has ever done since his accident.”

“Good God!”

“He has been having a new massage treatment, and there’s just a faint hope that some day he may be able to get about on crutches.”

Lawrence had an inclination to laugh.  “That’s enough,” he said, shuddering.  “I don’t want to hear any more.”

“She sent a message to you.”

“Well, give it to me, then.”

“‘Don’t let Lawrence suppose that Bernard has gone unpunished.’”

“He should have stood his trial,” said Lawrence thickly.  “It was murder.”

He understood all that Laura’s laconic message implied.  Bernard reformed was Bernard broken by remorse:  if he had shot himself—­ which was what Lawrence had anticipated—­he would have deserved less pity.  Yet Lawrence would have liked some swifter and less subtle form of punishment.