And Isabel Stafford too:  Clowes had left her out of the conversation as though she were a child, and though Lawrence tried to bring her in she remained, so to say, in the nursery most of the time, speaking when she was spoken to but without any of her characteristic freshness and boldness.  She was the schoolgirl that Clowes expected her to be.  Her very dress irritated Lawrence, as if he had seen a fine painting in a tawdry frame, or a pearl of price foiled by a spurious setting.  He had not felt any glow at all, and was left to suppose his fancy had played him a trick.  Disappointing! and now there was no chance of revising his impression, for apparently she had gone away with Laura—­who should have known better than to leave Captain Hyde to his own devices.  But probably Miss Stafford had refused to face the men alone:  it was what a little shy country girl would do.

Isabel’s arm hanging over the edge of the hammock, and pearly white in the dark, was his first warning of her presence.  He crossed the wood with his hunter’s step and found her lapped in dreams, the starlight that filtered between the alder branches chequering her with a faint diaper of light and shade.  Only the very young can afford to be, seen asleep, when the face sinks back into its original repose, and lines and wrinkles reappear in the loss of all that smiling charm of expression which may efface them by day.  Laura, asleep, looked old and haggard.  But Isabel presented a blank page, a face virginally pure, and candid, and lineless:  from the attitude of her young body one would have thought she was constructed without bones, and from her serenity it might have been a child who slept there in the June night, so placidly entrusting herself to its mild embrace.  Vividly aware that he had no right to watch her, Lawrence stood watching her, though afraid at every breath that she would wake up:  it was hard to believe that even in her sleep she could remain insensible of his eyes.  Here was the authentic Isabel, the girl who had enchanted him on the moor:  the incarnation of that classic beauty by which alone his spirit was capable of being touched to fine issues.  The alder branches quivered, their clusters of black shadow fell like an embroidered veil over the imperfections of her dress, but what light there was shone clear on her head and throat, and the pearly moulding of her shoulder, based where her sleeve was dragged down a little by the tension of her weight upon it.  All the mystery of womanhood and all its promise of life in bud and life not yet sown lay on this young girl asleep in the starshine.  Lights flashed up in the house, figures were moving between the curtains:  Laura had left Bernard, soon she would come out into the garden and call to Isabel, and Isabel would wake and his chance be lost.  His chance?  Isabel had rashly incurred a forfeit and would have to pay.  The frolic was old, there was plenty of precedent for it, and not for one moment did Lawrence dream