“Because I didn’t want it.  Don’t you worry:  I’ll look after myself.  I always do.  I’m a charming guest, no trouble to any one.”

“At least have a cigarette while you’re waiting for lunch!  I’m sorry to have none to offer you.”

“Don’t you smoke now?  You did at Farringay.”

“No, I’ve given it up.  I never much cared for it, and Bernard does so hate to see a woman smoking.  He is very old-fashioned in some ways.”

“And do you always do as Bernard likes?” Lawrence asked with an impertinence so airy that it left Laura no time to be offended. “—­It was a great shock to me to find him so helpless.  Is he always like that?”

“He can never get about, if that’s what you mean.”  It was not all Hyde meant, but Laura had not the heart to repress him; she felt that thrill of guilty joy which we all feel when some one says for us what we are too magnanimous to say for ourselves.  “He lies indoors all day smoking and reading quantities of novels.”

“Fearfully sad.  Very galling to the temper.  But there are a lot of modern mechanical appliances, aren’t there, that ought to make him fairly independent?”

“He won’t touch any of them.”

“Sick men have their whims.  But can’t you drag him out into the sun?  He ought not to lie in that mausoleum of a hall.”

“He has never been in the garden in all our years at Wanhope.”

Lawrence took off his straw hat to fan himself with.  It was not only the heat of the day that oppressed him.  “Poor, wretched Bernard!  But I dare say I should be equally mulish if I were in his shoes.  By the by, was he really in pain just now?”

“Really in pain?” Laura echoed.  “Why—­why should you say that?” She no longer doubted Lawrence Hyde’s subtlety. “’He’s constantly in pain and he scarcely ever complains.”

“Oh?  I didn’t know one suffered, with paralysis.”

“He has racking neuritis in his shoulders and back.”

“That’s bad.  I’m afraid he can’t be much up to entertaining visitors.  Does he hate having me here?”

“No! oh no!  I know he sometimes seems a little odd,” said poor Laura, wishing her guest were less clear-sighted:  and yet before he came she had been hoping that Lawrence would divine the less obvious aspects of the situation, and perhaps, since a man can do more with a man like Bernard than any woman can, succeed in easing it.  “But can you wonder?  Struck down like this at five and twenty! and he never was keen on indoor interests—­sport and his profession were all he cared about.  Please, Lawrence, make allowances for him—­he had been looking forward so much to your coming here!  A man’s society always does him good, and you know how few men there are in this country:  we have only the vicar, and the doctor, and Jack Bendish and people who stay at the Castle.  And if you only realized how different he was with you from what he is with most people, you would be flattered!  He won’t let any one touch him as a rule, except Barry, whom he treats like a machine.  But he was quite grateful to you—­he seemed to lean on you.”