han her own life when this fiery dramatic glow was
shed over it. A singular smile flitted over her lips: "Well, you
may as well sit down now you are here," she observed. Lawrence
sat down in a deck chair and Isabel's smile broadened: she was
laughing at him and teasing him with her eyes, though what she
said remained conventional to the point of primness. "Is Laura
coming to see me? How sweet of her! But what a pity she
couldn't come with you! Why couldn't she?"

"I believe she stayed to look after my cousin."

"How is Major Clowes? Did he have a good night and was he in a--
was he cheerful today?"

"So-so: he's not a great talker, is he?"

Isabel's speaking face expressed dissent. "Perhaps not when
he's in a good temper. Oh, I'm so sorry, I'm always forgetting
he's your cousin."

"I'm prone to forget it myself. I've seen so little of him."

"('Though the blase-man-of-the-world had seen thousands of
superbly beautiful women in elegant creations by Paquin or Worth,
his gaze was riveted as by a mesmeric attraction on the innocent
young girl in her simple little white muslin frock, with her
lissome ankles and slim, sunburnt hands.') Laura said you had
been a great traveller. Shall you settle down in England?"

"Not unless I marry."

Isabel declined this topic, on which Mrs. Jack Bendish would have
expatiated. "Laura says you have a lovely old house in
Somersetshire. It must be jolly to have an ancestral house."

"Mine is not ancestral," said Lawrence amused. "My father bought
it forty years ago at the time of the agricultural depression.
It belonged to some county people--Sir Frank Fleet--who
couldn't afford to keep it up. It is a lovely place, Farringay,
but it's full of Fleet ghosts and the neighbourhood doesn't let
me forget that I'm an alien."

"But how absurd! how narrow-minded!" exclaimed Isabel. "Houses
must change hands now and then, and I dare say your father was a
better landlord than the Fleets were. Besides, see how much worse it
might have been! There's Wilmerdings, here in Chilmark, that the
Morleys have taken: his name isn't Morley at all, Yvonne says it's
Moss in the City: but they foreclosed on the Orr-Matthews' mortgage
and turned them out, and that darling old place is delivered over to
a horrid little Jew!"

"Poor Morley!" said Lawrence laughing. "I am a Jew myself."
Isabel was stricken dumb. "I thought I had better tell you than
let you hear it from some one else.