“At the present moment I am deeply interested.  Go on:  it charms me to be dissected to my face, and by such an able hand.”

“No:  it’s absurd and I never meant to begin it.  Of course I don’t know a bit what you’re like.”

“God forbid!” Lawrence murmured:—­“Guess away and I’ll tell you if you’re right.”

“You won’t play fair.  You won’t own up and you’ll get cross if I do.”

“Not I, I have the most amiable temper in the world.”

“Now I wonder if that’s true?” said Isabel, scrutinizing him closely.  “Perhaps you wouldn’t often take the trouble to get in a wax.  Oh well,” surrendering at indiscretion, “then I guess that you care for very few people and for those few very much.”

“Missed both barrels.  I like any number of people and I shouldn’t care if I never saw one of them again.”

Isabel laughed.  “I said you wouldn’t play fair.”

“Don’t you believe me?”

“No, of course not.  You wouldn’t say it if it were true.”

Lawrence drew a deep breath and looked away.  Their nook of turf was out of sight of the house, sheltered from it behind a great thicket of lilac and syringa, which walled off the lawn from the kitchen garden full of sweet-smelling currant bushes and apple-trees laden with green fruit.  The sleepy air was alive with gilded wasps, and between the stiffly-drooping apple-branches, with their coarse foliage, and the pencilled frieze of stonecrop and valerian waving along the low stone boundarywall, there was a dim honey-coloured expanse that stretched away like an inland sea, where, the afternoon sunshine lay in a yellow haze over brown and yellow and blue tracts of the Plain.  Nothing was to be heard but the drone of wings near at hand and the whirr of a haycutter far down in the valley.  No one was near and summer lay heavy on the land.

“I did care once. .  I had a bad smash in my life when I was little more than a boy.”  He dragged a heavy gold band from his finger.  “That was my wedding ring.”

“Oh ...  I’m sorry!” faltered Isabel.  She was stunned by the extraordinary confidence.

“I married out of my class.  It was when I was at Cambridge.  She was a beautiful girl but she was not a lady.  Her father was a tobacconist in the Cury, and Lizzie liked to serve in the shop.  As she didn’t want to lose her character nor I my degree, we compromised on secret nuptials.  I took a house for her in Newham where I could go and visit her.  I ought not to tell you the rest of the story.”

“Oh yes, you can,” said Isabel simply.  “I hear all sorts of stories in the village.”

So childish in some ways, so mature in others, she saw that Lawrence was longing to unbosom himself, and her instinct was to listen quietly, for, after all, this, though the strangest, was not the first such confidence that had been poured into her ear.  She and her brother Val were alike in occasionally hearing secrets that had never been told to any one else.  Why?  Probably because they never gave advice, never moralized, never thought of themselves at all but only of the friend in distress.  Isabel took Hyde’s hand and held it closely, palm to palm.  “Tell me all about it.”