“I won’t have it.”  Bernard’s heavy jaw was clenched like a bloodhound’s.  “It’s not decent running after Hyde while I’m tied here by the leg.  I won’t have you set all the village talking.  There’s the Times on my table.  Stop.  Where are you going?”

“To ring the bell.  It’s time Miller started.  You don’t want your cousin to find no one there to meet him—­not even a cart for his luggage.”

“He can walk.  Do him good:  and Miller can fetch the luggage afterwards.  You do as I tell you.  Take the Times.  Sit down in that chair with your face to the light and read me the leading articles and the rest of the news on Page 7.  Don’t gabble:  read distinctly if you can—­you’re supposed to be an educated woman, aren’t you?”

Poor Laura had been looking forward to her drive.  She had taken some innocent pleasure in choosing the prettiest of her morning dresses, a gingham that fell into soft folds the colour of a periwinkle, and in rearranging the liberty scarf on her drooping gipsy straw, and in putting on her long fringed gauntlets and little country shoes.  Her husband’s compliments made her wince, Jack Bendish had eyes only for his wife, Val Stafford’s admiration was sweet but indiscriminate:  but she remembered Lawrence as a connoisseur.  And worse than the sting of her own small disappointment were the breaking of her promise to Lawrence, the failure in hospitality, in common courtesy.

And for the thousandth time Laura wondered whether it would not have been better for Bernard, in the long run, to defy his senseless tyranny.  He was at her mercy:  it would have been easy to defy him.  Easy, but how cruel!  A trained nurse would have made short work of Bernard’s whims, he would have been washed and brushed and fed and exercised and disregarded—­till he died under it?  Perhaps.  It was safer at all events to let him go his own way.  He could never hope to command his regiment now:  let him get what satisfaction he could out of commanding his wife!  She would have preferred a form of sacrifice which looked less like fear, but there was little sentiment in Bernard, and love must not pick and choose.  For it was love still, the old inexplicable fascination:  in the middle of one of his tirades, when he was at his most wayward, she would lose herself in the contemplation of some small physical trait, the scar of a burn on his wrist or the tiny trefoil-shaped birthmark on his temple, as if that summed up for her the essence of his personality, and were more truly Bernard Clowes then his intemperate insignificance of speech. . . .  Even when others suffered for it she yielded to Bernard, because she loved him and because he suffered so infinitely worse than they.

For denial maddened him.  He raised himself on his arm, crimson with anger, his chest heaving under the thin silken jacket which defined his gaunt ribs—­“Sit down, will you, damn you?” Because Laura believed that she and she only stood between her husband and despair, she yielded and began to read out the Times leader in a voice that was perfectly gentle and placid.