“I assure you I’m not afraid,” said Lawrence, looking at her so oddly that Isabel was not sure whether he was angry or amused.  Nor was Lawrence.  She had struck out of his male vanity a resentment so crude that he was ashamed of it, ashamed or even shocked?  He was not readily shocked.  A pure cynic, he let into his mind, on an easy footing, primitive desires that the average man admits only behind a screen.  Yet when these libertine fancies played over Isabel’s innocent head they were distasteful to him:  as he remembered once, in a Barbizon studio, to have knocked a man down for a Gallic jest on the Queen of Heaven although Luke’s Evangel meant no more to him than the legend of Eros and Psyche.  But one can’t knock oneself down—­more’s the pity!

“Oh, all right,” said Isabel impatiently.  He was watching her again!  “But do look where you’re going, this isn’t Piccadilly.  You had better hold my hand.”

Lawrence was six and thirty.  At eighteen he would have snatched her up and carried her over:  at thirty-six he said:  “Thanks very much,” touched the tips of her fingers, let them fall. . . .  Unfortunately however he weighed more than Isabel or the shepherds, and, half way across, the green floor quietly gave way under him:  first one foot immersed itself with a gentle splash and then the other—­“Oh dear” said Isabel, seized with a great disposition to laugh.  Lawrence was not amused.  His boots were full of mud and water and he had an aching sense of injured dignity.  The bog was not even dangerous:  and ankle-deep, calf-deep, knee-deep he waded through it and got out on the opposite bank, bringing up a cloud of little marsh-bubbles on his heels.  Isabel would have given all the money she had in the world—­about five shillings to go away and laugh, but she had been well brought up and she remained grave, though she grew very red.

“I am so sorry!” she faltered, looking up at Lawrence with her beautiful sympathetic eyes (one must never say I told you so).  “I never thought you really would go in.  You must be very heavy!  Oh! dear, I’m afraid you’ve spoilt your trousers, and it was all my fault.  Oh! dear, I hope you won’t catch cold.  Do you catch cold easily?”

“Oh no, thanks.  Do you mind showing me the way to Wanhope?”

Isabel without another word took the steep hillside at a run.  In her decalogue of manners to refuse an apology was an unpardonable sin.  How differently Val would have behaved!  Val never lost his temper over trifles, and if anything happened to make him look ridiculous he was the first to laugh at himself.  At this time in her life Isabel compared Val with all the other men she met and much to his advantage.  She forgot that Lawrence was not her brother and that no man cares to be made ridiculous before a woman, or rather she never thought of herself as a woman at all.

She pointed east by south across the Plain.  “Do you see that hawk hovering?  Carry your eye down to the patch of smoke right under him, in the trees:  those are the Wanhope chimneys.  If you go straight over there till you strike the road, it will bring you into Chilmark High Street.  Go on past Chapman the draper’s shop, turn sharp down a footpath opposite the Prince of Wales’s Feathers, cross the stream by a footbridge, and you’ll be in the grounds of Wanhope.”