“Or a French June?” suggested Laura, her accent faintly sly.  “Lucian said he met you at Auteuil.”

“Dear old Lucian!  He seemed very fit, but rather worried about you, Laura—­may I call you Laura?  We’re cousins by marriage, which constitutes a sort of tie.  Besides, you let me at Farringay.”

“Farringay. . . .  What a long while ago it seems!  I can’t keep up any pretence of juvenility with you, can I?  We were the same age then so we’re both thirty-six now.  Isn’t it strange to think that half one’s life is over?  Mine doesn’t seem ever to have begun.  But you wouldn’t feel that:  a man’s life is so much fuller than a woman’s.  You’ve been half over the world while Berns and I have been patiently cultivating our cabbage patch.  I envy you:  it would be jolly to have one’s mind stored full of queer foreign adventures and foreign landscapes to think about in odd moments, even if it were only millet fields.”

“I’ve no ties, you see, nothing to keep me in England.  Come to think of it, Bernard is my nearest male relative, since my father died five years ago.”

“I heard of that and wanted to write to you, but I wasn’t sure of your address”

“I was in Peru.  They cabled to me to come home when he was taken ill, but I was up country and missed it.  The first news I had was a second cable announcing his death.  It was unlucky.”

“For both of you,” said Laura gently, “if it meant that he was alone when he died.”  Sincere herself, Mrs. Clowes exacted from her friends either sincerity or silence, and her sweet half-melancholy smile pierced through Hyde’s conventional regrets.  He was silent, a little confused.

They were near the river now, and in the pale shadow of the lime tree Laura sat down on a bench, while Hyde threw himself on a patch of sunlit turf at her feet.  Most men of his age would have looked clumsy in such an unbuttoned attitude, but Hyde was an athlete still, and Laura, who was fond of sketching, admired his vigorous grace.  She felt intimate with him already:  she was not shy nor was Lawrence, but this was an intimacy of sympathy that went deeper than the mere trained ease of social intercourse:  she could be herself with him:  she could say whatever she liked.  And, looking back on the old days which she had half forgotten, Laura remembered that she had always felt the same freedom from constraint in Hyde’s company:  she had found it pleasant fourteen years ago, when she was young and had no reserves except a natural delicacy of mind, and it was pleasant still, but strange, after the isolating adventure of her marriage.  Perhaps she would not now have felt it so strongly, if he had not been her husband’s cousin as well as her friend.