you don't
mean a word of it, but I rather hate it for your own sake. It
isn't worthy of you, old boy. It's so--so ungentlemanly."

"So it is. But I do it because I'm bored. I am bored, you know.
Desperately!" He stretched out his hand to her with such haggard,
hunted eyes that Laura, reckless, threw herself down by him and
kissed the heavy eyelids. Clowes put his arm round her neck,
fondling her hair, and for a little while peace, the peace of
perfect mutual tenderness, fell on this hard-driven pair. But
soon, a great sigh bursting from his breast, Clowes pushed her
away, his features settling back into their old harsh lines of
savage pain and scorn.

"Get away! get up! do you want Parker to see you through the
window? If there's a thing on earth I hate it's a dishevelled
crying woman. Write to Lawrence. Say I shall be delighted to
see him and that I hope he'll give us at least a week. Stop.
Warn him that I shan't be able to see much of him because of
my invalid habits, and that I shall depute you to entertain
him. That ought to fetch him if he remembers you when you were
twenty-two."

Laura was neither dishevelled nor in tears: perhaps such scenes
were no novelty to her. She leant against the frame of the open
window, looking out over the sunlit garden full of flowers, over
the wide expanse of turf that sloped down to a wide, shallow
river all sparkling in western light, and over airy fields on
the other side of it to the roofs of the distant village strung
out under a break of woody hill.

"Are you sure you want him? He used to have a hot temper when he
was a young man, and you know, Berns, it would be tiresome if
there were any open scandal."

"Scandal be hanged," said Bernard Clowes. "You do as you're
told." His wife gave an almost imperceptible shrug of the
shoulders as if to disclaim further responsibility. She was
breathing rather hurriedly as if she had been running, and her
neck was so white that the shadow of her sunlit wistaria threw a
faint lilac stain on the warm, fine grain of her skin. And the
haggard look returned to Bernard's eyes as he watched her, and
with it a wistfulness, a weariness of desire, "hungry, and
barren, and sharp as the sea." Laura never saw that hunger in
his eyes. If he spared her nothing else he spared her that.

"You do as I tell you, old girl," his harsh voice had softened
again. "There won't be any row. Honestly I'd like to have old
Lawrence here for a