“If he had been English he would have deserved to be shot,” said Isabel briefly:  then, reverting to a subject in which she was far more deeply interested, “Rowsley—­my second brother—­said I wasn’t to cross-examine you:  but it was a great temptation, because one never can get anything out of Val.  And after all we’ve the right to be proud of him!  Even then, when every one was so brave, you would say, wouldn’t you, that Val earned his distinction?  It really was what the Gazette called it, ’conspicuous gallantry’?”

“It was a daring piece of work,” said Lawrence, reddening to his hair.  He fought down a sensation so unfamiliar that he could scarcely put a name to it, and forced himself on:  “We were all proud of him and we none of us forget it.  Don’t tell him I said so, though.  It isn’t etiquette.  You won’t think I’m trying to minimize what Val did, will you, if I say that we who were through the fighting saw so many horrible and ghastly things . . .”  Again his voice failed.  He was aware of Isabel’s bewilderment, but he was seeing more ghosts than he had seen in all the intervening years of peace, and they came between him and the sunlit landscape and Isabel’s young eyes.  War! always war! human bodies torn to rags in a moment, and the flowers of the field wet with a darker moisture than rain:  the very smell of the trenches was in his nostrils, their odour of blood and decay.  What in heaven’s name had brought it all back, and, stranger still, what had moved him to speak of it and to betray feelings whose very existence was unknown to him and which he had never betrayed before?

The silence was brief though to Lawrence it seemed endless.  He drove the ghosts back to quarters and finished quietly:  “Well, we won’t talk about that, it’s not a pleasant subject.  Only give Val my love and tell him if he doesn’t look me up soon I shall come and call on him.  We’re much too old friends to stand on ceremony.”

“All right, I will,” said Isabel.

There was a shrub of juniper close by, and she felt under its sharp branches.  “Do you like honeysuckle?” She held up a fresh sprig fragrant with its pale horns, which she had tracked to covert by its scent.  Lawrence was not given to wearing buttonholes, but he understood the friendly and apologetic intention and inclined his broad shoulder for Miss Stafford to pass the stem through the lapel of his coat.  Isabel had not intended to pin it in for him, but she was generally willing to do what was expected of her.  She took a pin from her own dress (there were plenty in it), and fastened the flower deftly on the breast of Captain Hyde’s white jacket.