“Isabel! really! you ridiculous child, why have you such a spite against poor Lawrence?  Any one would think he was a perfect Daniel Lambert!  Do you know he’s a pukka sportsman and has shot all over the world?  Lions and tigers, and rhinoceros, and grizzly bears, and all sorts of ferocious animals!  He’s promised me a black panther skin for my parlour and he’s persuaded Bernard to call in Dr. Verney for his neuritis, so I won’t hear another word against him!”

“Has he?  H’m. . . .  No, I haven’t any prejudice against him:  in fact I like him,” said Isabel, smiling to herself.  “But he reminds me of Tom Wallis at the Prince of Wales’s Feathers.  Do you remember Tom?  ‘Poor Tom,’ Mrs. Wallis always says, ’he went from bad to worse.  First it was a drop too much of an evening:  and then he began getting drunk mornings:  and then he ’listed for a soldier!’ Not that Captain Hyde would get drunk, but he has the same excitable temperament. . . .  Laura!”

“What is it?” said Mrs. Clowes, framing the young face between her hands as Isabel rose up kneeling before her.  In the quivering apple-tree shadow Isabel’s eyes were very dark, and penetrating and reflective too, as if she had just undergone one of those transitions from childhood to womanhood which are the mark and the charm of her variable age.  Laura was puzzled by her judgment of Lawrence Hyde, so keen, yet so wide of the truth as Laura saw it:  “excitable” was the last thing that Laura would have called him, and she couldn’t see any likeness to Tom Wallis.  But one can’t argue over a man’s character with a child.  “Why so serious?”

“This evening, at dinner, weren’t there some queer undercurrents?”

“Undercurrents!” Laura drew her hands away.  She looked startled and nervous.  “What sort of undercurrents?”

“When they were chaffing Val about his ribbon.  Oh, I don’t know,” said Isabel vaguely.  Laura drew a breath of relief.  “I was sorry you made him wear it.  But he’d cut his hand off to please you, darling.  You don’t really realize the way you can make Val do anything you like.”

“Nonsense,” said Laura, but with an indulgent smile, which was her way of saying that it was true but did not signify.  She was no coquette, but she preferred to create an agreeable impression.  Always in France, where women are the focus of social interest, there had been men who did as Laura Selincourt pleased, and the incense which Val alone continued to burn was not ungrateful to her altar.  “As if Val would mind about a little thing like that.”

Isabel shook her head.  “Perhaps you weren’t attending.  Major Clowes was very down on him for wearing it—­chaffing him, of course, but chaffing half in earnest:  a snowball with a stone in it.  Naturally Val wasn’t going to say you made him—­”

“No, but Lawrence did:  or I should have cut in myself.”

“Yes, after a minute, he interfered, and then Major Clowes shut up, but it was all rather—­rather queer, and I’m sure Val hated it.  You won’t make him do it again, will you?  Val’s so odd.  Laura—­don’t tell any one—­I sometimes think Val’s very unhappy.”