Bernard sank back and watched her like a cat after a mouse.  He was under no delusion:  he knew she was not cowed or nervous, but that the spring of her devotion was pity—­pity ever fed anew by his dreadful helplessness:  and it was this knowledge that drove him into brutality.  The instincts of possession and domination were strong in him, and but for the accident that wrenched his mind awry he would probably have made himself a king to Laura, for, once her master, he would have grown more gentle and more tender as the years went by, while Laura was one of those women who find happiness in love and duty:  not a weak woman, not a coward, but a humble-minded woman with no great opinion of her own judgment, who would have liked to look up to father, brother, sister, husband, as better and wiser than herself.  But in his present avatar he could not master her:  and Clowes, feeling as she felt, seeing himself as she saw him, came sometimes as near madness as any man out of an asylum.  He was not far off it now, though he lay quiet enough, with not one grain of expression in his cold black eyes.

The 11:39 pulled up at Countisford station, and Lawrence Hyde got out of a first class smoking carriage and stood at ease, waiting for his servant to come and look after him.  “There’ll be a car waiting from Wanhope, Gaston—­”

“Zere no car ’ere, M’sieu—­ze man say.”

“What, no one to meet me?” Evidently no one:  there were not half a dozen people on the flower-bordered platform, and those few were country folk with bundles and bags.  Lawrence strolled out into the yard, hoping that his servant’s incorrigibly lame English might have led to a misunderstanding.  But there was no vehicle of any kind, and the station master could not recommend a cab.  Countisford was a small village, smaller even than Chilmark, and owed the distinction of the railway solely to its being in the flat country under the Plain.  “But you don’t mean to say,” said Lawrence incredulous, “that I shall have to walk?”

But it seemed there was no help for it, unless he preferred to sit in the station while a small boy on a bicycle was despatched to Chilmark for the fly from the Prince of Wales’s Feathers; and in the end Lawrence went afoot, though his expression when faced with four miles of dusty road would have moved pity in any heart but that of his little valet.  Hyde was one of those men who change their habits when they change their clothes.  He did not care what happened to him when he was out of England, following the Alaskan trail in eighty degrees of frost, or thrashing round the Horn in a tramp steamer, but when he shaved off his beard, and put on silk underclothing and the tweeds of Sackville Street, he grew as lazy as any flaneur of the pavement.  Gaston however was not sympathetic.  He was always glad when anything unpleasant happened to his master.

Leaving Gaston to sit on the luggage, Lawrence swung off with his long even stride, flicking with his stick at the bachelor’s buttons in the hedge.  He could not miss his way, said the station master:  straight down the main road for a couple of miles, then the first turning on the left and the first on the left again.  Some half a mile out of Countisford however Lawrence came on a signpost and with the traveller’s instinct stopped to read it: