“I don’t detest other people’s smoking,” she explained in a rather penitent tone.

“Let’s get out on the downs,” said Lawrence.  He swung the gate to and fro for her, then took off his hat and strolled slowly by her side through the rustling grass.  “Really,” he said, more to himself than to her, “there are places in England that are very well worth while.”

“Worth while what?”

“Er—­worth coming to see.  I suppose there isn’t much shooting to be had except rabbits.”  He swung an imaginary gun to his shoulder and sighted it at a quarry which seemed to Isabel to be equally imaginary.  “See him?  Under that heap of stones left of the beech ring.”  Isabel’s vision was both keen and practised, but she saw nothing till the rabbit showed his white scut in a flickering leap to earth.

“You have jolly good eyes,” she conceded, still rather grudgingly.

“So have bunnies, unluckily.  Major Clowes tells me there’s pretty good shooting over Wanhope.  I suppose your brother looks after it, for of course Clowes can do nothing.  It was a great stroke of luck for my cousin, getting hold of a fellow like Val.”

“I don’t know about that.  It was a great stroke of luck for Val.”

“I want so much to meet him.  I’m disappointed at missing him this afternoon.  I remember him perfectly in the army, though he was only a boy then and I wasn’t much more myself.  He must be close on thirty now.  But when I met him this morning it struck me he hadn’t altered much.”  Isabel, looking up eager-eyed, felt faintly and mysteriously chilled.  Was there a point of cruelty in Hyde’s smile? as there was now and then in his cousin’s:  she had seen Bernard Clowes watching his wife with the same secret glow.

“Val is old for his age,” she said.  “He always seems much older than my other brother, although there are only two or three years between them.”

“Probably his spell in the army aged him.  It must have been a formative experience.”

This time Isabel had no doubt about it, there was certainly a touch of cruel irony in Hyde’s soft voice.  Her breath came fast.  “Why do you say that”:  she cried—­“say it like that?”

The smile faded:  Lawrence turned, startled out of his self-possession.  “Like what?”

“As if you we’re sneering at Val!”

“I?—­ My dear Miss Isabel, aren’t you a little fanciful?”

Isabel supposed so too, on second thoughts:  how could any man sneer at a record like Val’s:  unless indeed it were with that peculiarly graceless sneer which springs from jealousy?  And, little as she liked Captain Hyde, she could not think him weak enough for that.  She blushed again, this time without any rubric, and hung her head.  “I’m sorry!  But you did say it as if you didn’t mean it.  Perhaps you think we make too much fuss over Val?  But in these sleepy country villages exciting things don’t happen every day.  I dare say you’ve had scores of adventures since that time you met Val.  But Chilmark hasn’t had any.  That makes us remember.”