“No, thanks, I had too much tea.”  Isabel checked herself on the brink of reminding him that he had eaten only two cucumber sandwiches and a macaroon.  In Lawrence Hyde’s society her conversation had not its usual happy flow, she felt tonguetied and missish.  “How close you are to the Downs here!” They were following a flagged path between espalier pear trees, and beds of broccoli and carrots and onions, and borders full of old standard roses and lavender and sweet herbs and tall lilies; at the end appeared a wishing gate in a low stone wall, and beyond it, pathless and sunshiny, the southern stretches of the Plain.  “Are you a great gardener, Miss Isabel?”

“Some,” said Isabel.  “I look after my pet vegetables.  The flowers have to look after themselves.  My father has eruptions of industry.”  She overflowed into a little laugh.  “We don’t encourage him in it.  He had a bad attack of weeding last spring, and pulled up all my little salads by mistake.”  Now that small tale, she reflected, would have tickled Jack Bendish, but Captain Hyde, though he smiled at it dutifully, did not seem to be amused.

“Oh bother you!” Isabel apostrophised him mentally.  “You’re not the grandson of a duke anyhow.  I expect you would be nicer if you were.”

She folded her arms on the gate and gazed across the Plain.  The village below was not far off, but they could see nothing of it, buried as it was in the river-valley and behind a green arras of beech leaves:  in every other direction, far as the eye could see, leagues of feathery pale grass besprinkled with blue and yellow flowers went away in ribbed undulations, occasionally rolling up into a crest on which a company of fir trees hung like men on march.  The sun was pale and smudged, the sky veiled:  on its silken pallor floated, here and there, a blot of dark low cloud, and the clear distances presaged rain.

“May I—?” Lawrence took out his cigarettes.  Isabel gave a grudging assent.  She could not understand how any one could be willing to taint the sweet summering air that had blown over so many leagues of grass and flowers.  “Dare I offer you one?” Lawrence asked, tendering his case.  It was of gold, and bore his monogram in diamonds.  Isabel eyed it scornfully.  Jack Bendish’s was only silver and much scratched and dinted into the bargain.  Now Jack Bendish was the grandson of a duke.

“’No thank you,” said Miss Stafford.  “I detest smoking.”

To this Lawrence made no reply at all, no doubt, thought Isabel, because he did not consider it worth one.  She was proportionally surprised and a trifle flattered when he replaced the cigarette to which he had just helped himself. “’The young girl had not realized her own power.  She was only just coming into her woman’s kingdom.  Her heart beat faster and a vermilion blush dyed her pale cheek."’ Isabel’s favourite authors were Stevenson and Mr. Kipling, but her mental rubric insisted on clothing itself in the softer style of Molly Bawn.