“Some one said she was nineteen, but why?”

“I don’t know what you said to her, probably nothing of the slightest consequence, but she’s only a child, and you managed to upset her.  To be frank, I didn’t want her to see any one this afternoon.  Oh, she’s all right, but her arm has run her up a bit of a temperature, and Verney wants her to keep quiet for a few days.  It’ll give her an excuse to keep clear of the inquest too.  This sounds ungrateful as well as ungracious, when we owe you so much, but there’s no ingratitude in it, only common sense.”

“Oh, damn your common sense!” exclaimed Lawrence.

It was as laconic a warning-off as civility allowed:  and it irritated Lawrence beyond bearing to be rebuked by young Stafford, whose social life stood in his danger, whom he could at pleasure strip to universal crucifying shame.  But there was neither defiance nor fear in Val:  tranquil and unpretentious, in his force of character he reminded Lawrence of Laura Clowes.  She too had been attacked once or twice that evening by her husband, and Lawrence had admired the way in which she either foiled or evaded the rapier point, or took it to her bosom without flinching.  This same silken courage, it seemed, Val also possessed.  Both would stand up to a blow with the same grave dignity and—­perhaps—­secret scorn.

Minutes passed.  Val waited because he chose not to be the first to break silence, Lawrence because he was absorbing fresh impressions with that intensity which wipes out time and place.  He was in the mood to receive them:  tired, softened, and quickened, from the tears of the afternoon.  After all Val was Isabel’s brother and possessed Isabel’s eyes!  This drew Lawrence to him by a double cord:  practically, because it is inconvenient to be on bad terms with one’s brother-in-law, and mystically, because in his profound romantic passion he loved whatever was associated with her, down to the very sprig of honeysuckle that she had pinned into his coat.  But for this cord his relations with Stafford would have begun and ended in a casual regret for the casual indulgence of a cruel impulse.  But Isabel’s brother had ex officio a right of entry into Hyde’s private life, and, the doors once opened, he was dazed by the light that Val let in.

It was after ten o’clock and dews were falling, falling from a clear night.  “One faint eternal eventide of gems,” beading the dark turf underfoot and the pale faces of roses that had bloomed all day in sunshine:  now prodigal of scent only they hung their heads like ghosts of flowers among dark glossy leaves.  Stars hung sparkling on the dark field of heaven, stars threw down their spears on the dark river fleeting to the star-roofed distant Channel.  Stream and grass and leaf-buds were ephemeral and eternal, ever passing and ever renewed, old as the stars, or the waste ether in which they range:  the green, sappy stem, the dew-bead that hung on it, the shape of a ripple were the same now as when Nineveh was a queen of civilization and men’s flesh was reddening alive in osier cages over altar fires on Wiltshire downs.  And all the sweetness, all the romance of an English midsummer night seized the heart of Lawrence, a nomad, a returned exile, and a man in love—­as if he had never known England before.