“Quite,” said Isabel.  Mr. Stafford sighed.  “I must speak to Yvonne.  ‘How hardly shall they...’” He took a note out of his cash box.  “Can’t you make that do—?” he was beginning when a qualm of compunction came upon him.  After all it was a long time since he had given Isabel any money for herself, and there must be many little odds and ends about a young girl’s clothing that an elderly man wouldn’t understand.  He took out a second note and pressed them both hurriedly into Isabel’s palm.  “There! now run off and don’t ask me for another penny for the next twelvemonth!” he exclaimed, beaming over his generosity though more than half ashamed of it.  “You extravagant puss, you! dear, dear, who’d have a daughter?”

Isabel gave him a rather hasty though warm embrace (she was terribly afraid that his conscience would prick him and that he would take the second note away again), and flew out of the window faster than she had come in.  The clock was striking a quarter past one, and she had to scamper down to Chapman’s to buy the dress, and a length of lilac ribbon for a sash, and a packet of bronze hairpins, and be back in time to lay the cloth for two o’clock lunch.  If it is only for idle hands that Satan finds mischief, he could not have had much satisfaction out of Isabel Stafford.

Soon after four Mrs. Clowes stepped from her car, shook out her soft flounces, and led the way across the lawn, Lawrence Hyde in attendance.  The vicarage was an old-fashioned house too large for the living, its long front, dotted with rosebushes, rising up honey-coloured against the clear green of a beech grove.  There are grand houses that one sees at once will never be comfortable, and there are unpretentious houses that promise to be cool in summer and warm in winter and restful all the year round:  of such was Chilmark vicarage, sunning itself in the afternoon clearness, while faded green sunblinds filled the interior with verdant shadow, and the smell of sweetbrier and Japanese honeysuckle breathed round the rough-cast walls.

Isabel had laid tea on the lawn, and Mrs. Clowes smiled to herself when she saw seven worn deck chairs drawn up round the table; she was always secretly amused at Isabel in her character of hostess, at the naive natural confidence with which the young lady scattered invitations and dispensed hospitality.  But when Isabel came forward Laura’s covert smile passed into irrepressible surprise.  She raised her eyebrows at Isabel, who replied by an almost imperceptible but triumphant nod.  In her white and mauve embroidered muslin, her dark hair accurately parted at the side of her head and drawn back into what she called a soup plate of plaits, Isabel no longer threatened to be pretty.  Impelled by that singularly pure benevolence which a woman who has ceased to hope for happiness feels for the eager innocence of youth, Laura drew her close and kissed her.  “My sweet, I’m so glad,” she whispered.  A bright blush was Isabel’s only answer.  Then Mrs. Clowes stepped back and indicated her cavalier, very big and handsome in white clothes and a Panama hat:  “May I introduce—­ Captain Hyde, Miss Stafford,” with a delicate formality which thrilled Isabel to her finger-tips.  Let him see if he would call her a little girl now!