Over the brown mirror of the pool a troop of great dragonflies were ceaselessly darting to and fro, their metallic wings making a faint whirr as they looped in blinding mazes through the air that glowed blue with their splendour.  “Very beautiful,” said Lawrence.

“Are you out for a walk?  I’m on my way to Wancote.”  Here panic fell on Isabel, the panic that lies in wait for young girls:  if he were to think she thought he ought to offer to escort her!  “I’m late, I must go on now.  Good-bye!”

Lawrence stood looking down at her, impassive, almost sombre, but for the hot glow in his eyes.  His caution had gone overboard.  “Mayn’t I come too?”

“Oh. . . .”

“Do let me.”

“If you—­if you like.”

The valley narrowed as it receded, the upland air began to sparkle with a myriad prismatic needles that glittered from the wings of flies and beetles, and from dewdrops on patches of turf still as grey as hoarfrost in the shadow on the edge of a wood, and from wayside hollies whose leaf-points were all starred in silver.  The blue bow overhead was stainless, not a cloud in it nor a mist:  azure, azure, and unfathomable, like the heart of man, or the justice of God.—­Isabel was not shy now but alert and radiant, as if she had caught a sparkle from the air:  and expansive, as women are when they are sure of pleasing. “’For the jaded man of the world at her side, the young girl’s rustic freshness was her chief charm.  She was so different from the beautiful but heartless mondaines he had known in Town.  No diamonds glittered round her slender throat, and her hands, though small and well-shaped, were tanned by the summer sun.  But for the jaded-man-of-the-world, weary of sparkling epigram or caustic repartee, her simple chatter held a fascination of its own.’  I don’t believe,” reflected Isabel, coming down mentally to plain prose, “he’d mind if I talked to him about the dinner or last week’s washing bill.”

She did not in fact enter on any such intimate topic, but conversed sedately about parish politics and the beauties of the Plain.  “This is a very lonely part,” she said, “there are scarcely any houses.  I’m taking the magazine to one of Major Clowes’ shepherds.  It’s rather interesting going there.  He’s mad.”

“Mad!”

“As a March hare.  He’s perfectly harmless of course, and an excellent shepherd.  In lambing time he looks after the ewes like a mother, Val says his flock hardly ever lose a lamb.  But he’s a thrilling person to district-visit.  Last time I went he had the Prince of Wales staying with him.”

“Why on earth don’t they put him in an asylum?”