She sat with folded hands watching Lawrence with a vague, observant smile.  Drilled to a stately ease and worn down to a lean hardihood by his life of war and wandering, he was, like his cousin, a big, handsome man, but distinguished by the singular combination of black eyes and fair hair.  Was there a corresponding anomaly in his temperament?  He looked as though he had lived through many experiences and had come out of them fortified with philosophy—­that easy negative philosophy of a man of the world, for which death is only the last incident in life and not the most important.  Of Bernard’s hot passions there was not a sign.  Amiable?  Laura fancied that so far as she was concerned she could count on a personal amiability:  he liked her, she was sure of that, his eyes softened when he spoke to her.  But the ruck of people?  She doubted whether Lawrence would have lost his appetite for lunch if they had all been drowned.

The pleasant, selfish man of the world is a common type, but she could not confine Lawrence to his type.  He basked in the sun:  with every nerve of his thinly-clad body he relinquished himself to the contact of the warm grass:  deliberately and consciously he was savouring the honied air, the babble of running water, the caress of the tiny green blades fresh against his cheek and hand, the swell of earth that supported his broad, powerful limbs.  This sensuous acceptance of the physical joy of life pleased Laura, born a Selincourt, bred in France, and temperamentally out of touch with middle-class England.

Whether one could rely on him for any serviceable friendship Laura was uncertain.  As a youth he had inclined to idealize women, but she was suspicious of his later record.  Good or bad it had left no mark on him.  Probably he had not much principle where women were concerned.  Few of the men Laura had known in early life had had any principles of any sort except a common spirit of kindliness and fair play.  Her brother was always drifting in and out of amatory entanglements—­the hunter or the hunted—­and he was not much the worse for it so far as Laura could see.  Perhaps Hyde was of the game stamp, in which case there might well be no lines round his mouth, since lines are drawn by conflict:  or perhaps a wandering life had kept him out of harm’s way.  It made no great odds to Laura—­she had not the shrinking abhorrence which most women feel for that special form of evil:  it was on the same footing in her mind as other errors to which male human nature is more prone than female, a little worse than drunkenness but not so bad as cruelty.  From her own life of serene married maidenhood such sins of the flesh seemed as remote as murder.

The strong southern light broke in splinters on the dancing water, and was mirrored in reflected ripplings, silver-pale, tremulous, over the shadowy understems of grass and loosestrife on the opposite bank.  “And I never gave you anything to drink after all!” said Laura after a long, companionable silence.  “Why didn’t you remind me?”