he was the
schoolgirl that Clowes expected her to be. Her very dress
irritated Lawrence, as if he had seen a fine painting in a tawdry
frame, or a pearl of price foiled by a spurious setting. He had
not felt any glow at all, and was left to suppose his fancy had
played him a trick. Disappointing! and now there was no chance
of revising his impression, for apparently she had gone away with
Laura--who should have known better than to leave Captain Hyde
to his own devices. But probably Miss Stafford had refused to
face the men alone: it was what a little shy country girl would
do.

Isabel's arm hanging over the edge of the hammock, and pearly
white in the dark, was his first warning of her presence. He
crossed the wood with his hunter's step and found her lapped in
dreams, the starlight that filtered between the alder branches
chequering her with a faint diaper of light and shade. Only the
very young can afford to be, seen asleep, when the face sinks
back into its original repose, and lines and wrinkles reappear in
the loss of all that smiling charm of expression which may efface
them by day. Laura, asleep, looked old and haggard. But Isabel
presented a blank page, a face virginally pure, and candid, and
lineless: from the attitude of her young body one would have
thought she was constructed without bones, and from her serenity
it might have been a child who slept there in the June night, so
placidly entrusting herself to its mild embrace. Vividly aware
that he had no right to watch her, Lawrence stood watching her,
though afraid at every breath that she would wake up: it was hard
to believe that even in her sleep she could remain insensible of
his eyes. Here was the authentic Isabel, the girl who had
enchanted him on the moor: the incarnation of that classic beauty
by which alone his spirit was capable of being touched to fine
issues. The alder branches quivered, their clusters of black
shadow fell like an embroidered veil over the imperfections of
her dress, but what light there was shone clear on her head and
throat, and the pearly moulding of her shoulder, based where her
sleeve was dragged down a little by the tension of her weight
upon it. All the mystery of womanhood and all its promise of
life in bud and life not yet sown lay on this young girl asleep
in the starshine. Lights flashed up in the house, figures were
moving between the curtains: Laura had left Bernard, soon she
would come out into the