Thus primed, Laura was able to draw out her guest, and dinner passed off gaily, for Bernard Clowes was no dog in the manger, and listened with sparkling eyes to adventures that ranged from Atlantic sailing in a thirty-ton yacht to a Nigerian rhinoceros shoot.  Nor was Lawrence the focus of the lime-light-he was unaffectedly modest; but when, in expatiating on a favourite rifle, he confessed to having held fire till a charging rhinoceros bull was within eight and twenty yards of him, Bernard could supply the footnotes for himself.  “I knew she wouldn’t let me down,” said Lawrence apologetically.  “Ah! she was a bonnie thing, that old gun of mine.  Ever shoot with a cordite rifle?” Bernard shook his head.  “I’d like you to see my guns,” Lawrence continued, too shrewd to be tactful.  “I’ll have them sent down, shall I?  Or Gaston shall run up and fetch ’em.  He loves a day in town.”

Under this bracing treatment Bernard became more natural than Laura had seen him for a long time, and he stayed in the drawingroom after dinner, chatting with Lawrence and listening to his wife at the piano, till Laura thought the Golden Age had come again.  How long would it last?  Philosophers like Laura never ask that question.  At all events it lasted till half past nine, when the sick man was honestly tired and the lines of no fictitious pain were drawn deep about his mouth and eyes.

Mrs. Clowes went away with her husband, who liked to have her at hand while Barry was getting him to bed, and Lawrence had strolled out on the lawn, when a shutter was thrown down in Bernard’s room and Laura reappeared at the open window.  “Lawrence, are you there?” she asked, shading her eyes between her hands.

“Here,” said Lawrence removing his cigar.

“Will you be so very kind as to unlock the gate over the footbridge?  If Val does look us up tonight he’s sure to scramble over it, which is awkward for him with his stiff arm.”

She dropped a key down to Lawrence.  A voice—­Bernard’s called from within, “Good night, old fellow, thanks for a pleasant evening.  I’m being washed now.”

The night was overcast, warm, quiet, and very dark under the trees:  there was husbandry in heaven, their candles were all out.  And by the bridge under the pleated and tasselled branches of an alder coppice the river ran quiet as the night, only uttering an occasional murmur or a deep sucking gurgle when a rotten stick, framed in foam, span down the silken whirl of an eddy:  but down-stream, where waifs of mist curled like smoke off a grey mirror, there was a continual talking of open water, small cold river voices that chattered over a pebbly channel, or heaped themselves up and died down again in the harsh distant murmur of the weir.  The quantity of water that passed through the lock gates should have been constant from minute to minute, but the roar of it was not constant, nor the pitch of its note, which fell when Lawrence stood erect, but rose to a shrill overtone when he bent his head:  sometimes one would have thought the river was going down in spate, and then the volume of sound dwindled to a mere thread, a lisp in the air.  Lawrence was observing these phenomena with a mind vacant of thought when he heard footsteps brushing through the grass by the field path from the village.  Val had come, then, after all!