“So you know Mrs. Clowes, do you?” He said with as much politeness as a little girl deserves who has lovely eyes and a dirty face.  It had crossed his mind that she might be one of the servants at Wanhope:  he knew next to nothing of the English labouring classes, but was not without experience of lady’s maids.

“Yes, I know her,” said Isabel.  She hung on the brink of introducing herself—­was not Captain Hyde coming to tea with her that afternoon?—­but was deterred by a very unusual feeling of constraint.  She was not accustomed to be watched as Hyde was watching her, and she felt shy and restless, though she knew not why.  It never entered her head that he had taken her for Dorrie Drury’s sister.  She was dressed like a servant, but what of that?  In Chilmark she would have remained “Miss Isabel” if she had gone about in rags, and it would have wounded her bitterly to learn that she owed the deference of the parish rather to her rank as the vicar’s daughter, who visited at Wanhope and Wharton, than to any dignity of her own.  In all her young life no one had ever taken a liberty with Isabel.  And, for that matter, why should any one take a liberty with Dorrie Drury’s sister?  Isabel’s father would not have done so, nor her brothers, nor indeed Jack Bendish, and she was too ignorant of other men to know what it was that made her so hot under Hyde’s eyes.  “But you’ll be late for lunch.  Wait half a minute and I’ll run up with you to the top of the glen.”

Lawrence watched her wrap her charge carefully in a shawl, and fetch milk from the dresser, and coax till Dorrie turned her small head, heavy with the cares of neglected babyhood, sideways on the old plaid maud and began to suck.  Apparently he had interrupted the scrubbing of the kitchen floor, for the tiles were wet three quarters of the way over, and on a dry oasis stood a pail, a scrubbing brush, and a morsel of soap.  Among less honourable odours he was glad to distinguish a good strong whiff of carbolic.

Isabel meanwhile had recovered from her little fit of shyness.  She pulled off her apron and pulled down her skirt (it had been kilted to the knee), rinsed her hands under a tap, wiped her face with a wet handkerchief, and came out into the June sunshine bareheaded, her long pigtail swinging between drilled and slender shoulders.  “Yours are London boots,” she remarked as she buttoned her cuff.  “Do you mind going over the marsh?”

“Not at all.”

“Not if you get your feet wet?” Lawrence laughed outright.  “But it’s a real marsh!” said Isabel offended:  “and you’re not used to mud, are you?  You don’t look as if you were.”  She pointed down the glen, and Lawrence saw that some high spring, dammed at its exit and turned back on itself, had filled the wide bottom with a sponge of moss thickset with flowering rush and silken fluff of cotton grass.  “There’s no danger in summertime, the shepherds often cross it and so do I. Still if you’re afraid—­”