“Do you know much about country villages?” Isabel enquired.  “I thought not.  They never put any one in an asylum till after he’s got into trouble, and not always then if he doesn’t want to go:  just as they never build a bridge over a level crossing till one or two people have been killed.  We had a woman in Chilmark that was much madder than poor dear Ben is.  She took a knife out of her drawer once when I was there and told me she was going to cut her throat with it.  She made me feel the edge to see how sharp it was.  At last she cut the children’s throats instead of her own, and then they put her away, but none of them died and she’s out again now.  She’s supposed to be cured.  You see a County asylum doesn’t keep people longer than it must because the money comes out of the rates.”

“Do you mean to say,” Lawrence fastened on the point that struck him most forcibly, “that your father lets you go to such places by yourself?”

“Oh yes:  why not?  He would think it showed want of faith to prevent me.  He’s very sensible about things like that,” said Isabel without affectation.  “There are always typhoid and diphtheria about in the autumn, but Jimmy never fusses.  It wouldn’t be much use if he did, with him and Val always in and out of infected houses.”

“Pure fatalism—­” said Lawrence, hitting with his stick at the flowers by their path.  “Your brother ought to put his foot down—­” Isabel seized his arm.

“Take care!—­ There was a bee in it.  You really are most careless Captain Hyde!  I shan’t take you for any more walks if you do that.  I dare say it was one of my own bees, and he had the very narrowest escape!  And Val wouldn’t dream of interfering.  Ben and I are the best of friends.  Besides, it’s Mrs. Janaway I really go to see, poor dear, she don’t ever hear a bit o’ news from week’s end to week’s end.  Wouldn’t you be glad to see me,” her eyes were destitute of challenge but not of humour, “if you lived three miles deep in the Plain, alone with your husband and the Prince of Wales?”

“I should be delighted to see you at any time.”

Isabel, not knowing what to do with this speech, let it alone.  “And the dog:  I mustn’t forget the dog.  They have a thoroughbred Great Dane.  Mr. Bendish gave Ben the puppy because it was the worst of the litter and they thought it would die:  but it didn’t die—­no animal does that Ben gets hold of—­and he’s too fond of it now to part with it, though a dog fancier from Amesbury has offered him practically his own price for it.”

“I should like to see the Dane.”

“Well, you will, if you come with me.  There’s the cottage.”

They had turned a bend and the head of the dale lay before them, a mere dimpling depression between breasts of chalky grass.  Set close by the way on a cross-track, which forded the brook by stepping stones and went on over the downs to Amesbury, stood a small, square, tumbledown cottage, its door opening on primeval turf, though behind it a plot of garden enclosed in a quickset hedge provided Mrs. Janaway with cabbages and gooseberries and sour apples and room to hang out the clothes.