r eyes open? Life at Wanhope
isn't all plain sailing."

"Plain sailing for Bernard?"

"Or for his wife."

"You speak as the friend of the house who sees both sides?"

"They're forced on me."

"I'll stay as long as I'm comfortable," said Lawrence, cynically
frank. "More I can't promise."

Val leant back with an imperceptible shrug. He was disappointed
but not surprised: there was in Hyde a vein of hard selfishness--
not a weakness, for the egoism which openly says "I will consult
my own convenience first" is too scornful of public opinion to be
called weak, but an acquired defensive quality on which argument
would have been thrown away. Val's arm dropped inert, he was
tired, not in body alone, but by the strain of contact with
another mind, hostile, and pitiless, and dominant.

And Lawrence also was content to sit silent, lulled by the rising
and falling murmur of the stream, and by that agreeably cruel
memory. . . . He had no inclination to recall it to Val, but it
lent an emotional piquancy to their intercourse. He had the whip
hand of Val through the past, and perhaps the present also.
Lawrence had been struck by Val's allusion to Mrs. Clowes. He
was the friend of the house, was he? Now the position of a
friend of the house who shields a wife from her husband is
notoriously a delicate one.

Val roused himself. "Well, we'll drop this. I must now say two
words on a different subject: I'd rather let it alone, and so I
dare say would you, but we shall meet a good deal off and on
while you're here, and it had better be got over. I'm sorry if I
embarrass you--"

"Set your mind at rest," said Lawrence, silkenly brutal. "You
don't embarrass me at all."

He threw away his cigar and got up laughing, and as Val also rose
Lawrence gently slapped him on the back. "I know what you're
driving at--that you've not forgotten that small indiscretion
of yours, or ceased to regret it. Don't you worry, Val! You
always were one of the worrying sort, weren't you? But you need
never refer to it again, and I won't if you don't." Surely a
generous, a handsome offer! But Stafford only touched with the
tips of his fingers the ringed and manicured hand of the elder
man.

"Thank you! But I wasn't going to say anything of the sort. The
fact is that for a long while I've been making up my mind to see
you some time when you were in England: there was no hurry,
because so long as my father's alive I can do nothing,