unaffectedly modest; but when, in expatiating on a favourite
rifle, he confessed to having held fire till a charging
rhinoceros bull was within eight and twenty yards of him, Bernard
could supply the footnotes for himself. "I knew she wouldn't let
me down," said Lawrence apologetically. "Ah! she was a bonnie
thing, that old gun of mine. Ever shoot with a cordite rifle?"
Bernard shook his head. "I'd like you to see my guns," Lawrence
continued, too shrewd to be tactful. "I'll have them sent down,
shall I? Or Gaston shall run up and fetch 'em. He loves a day in
town."

Under this bracing treatment Bernard became more natural than
Laura had seen him for a long time, and he stayed in the
drawingroom after dinner, chatting with Lawrence and listening to
his wife at the piano, till Laura thought the Golden Age had come
again. How long would it last? Philosophers like Laura never
ask that question. At all events it lasted till half past nine,
when the sick man was honestly tired and the lines of no
fictitious pain were drawn deep about his mouth and eyes.

Mrs. Clowes went away with her husband, who liked to have her at
hand while Barry was getting him to bed, and Lawrence had
strolled out on the lawn, when a shutter was thrown down in
Bernard's room and Laura reappeared at the open window.
"Lawrence, are you there?" she asked, shading her eyes between
her hands.

"Here," said Lawrence removing his cigar.

"Will you be so very kind as to unlock the gate over the
footbridge? If Val does look us up tonight he's sure to scramble
over it, which is awkward for him with his stiff arm."

She dropped a key down to Lawrence. A voice--Bernard's called
from within, "Good night, old fellow, thanks for a pleasant
evening. I'm being washed now."

The night was overcast, warm, quiet, and very dark under the
trees: there was husbandry in heaven, their candles were all out.
And by the bridge under the pleated and tasselled branches of an
alder coppice the river ran quiet as the night, only uttering an
occasional murmur or a deep sucking gurgle when a rotten stick,
framed in foam, span down the silken whirl of an eddy: but
down-stream, where waifs of mist curled like smoke off a grey mirror,
there was a continual talking of open water, small cold river voices
that chattered over a pebbly channel, or heaped themselves up and
died down again in the harsh distant murmur of the weir. The
quantity of water that passed through the