couldn't bear to."

"Bosh again--excuse me. I must go home. Good-night, dear." He
held out his hand, wishing, in the repressed way that had become
a second nature to him, that Laura would not wring it so warmly
and so long. In the first bitterness of disappointment--so much
the keener for his unlucky confidence to Rowsley--Val could not
stand sympathy. Not even from Laura? Least of all from Laura.
He nodded to her with a bright careless smile and went out into
the night.

But he had still one more mission to perform before he could go
home to break the bad news to Rowsley: a trying mission under
which Val fretted in repressed distaste. He came up to Lawrence
holding out the gold cigarette case. "You dropped this at our
place when you were talking to my sister this afternoon."

"Did I?" Lawrence slipped it into his pocket. His manner was
perfectly calm. "Thanks so much.--I hadn't missed it." He had
no fear of having been betrayed, in essentials, by Isabel.

"I don't want to offend you," Val continued with his direct
simplicity of manner, "but perhaps you hardly realize how young
my sister is."

"Some one said she was nineteen, but why?"

"I don't know what you said to her, probably nothing of the
slightest consequence, but she's only a child, and you managed to
upset her. To be frank, I didn't want her to see any one this
afternoon. Oh, she's all right, but her arm has run her up a bit
of a temperature, and Verney wants her to keep quiet for a few
days. It'll give her an excuse to keep clear of the inquest too.
This sounds ungrateful as well as ungracious, when we owe you so
much, but there's no ingratitude in it, only common sense."

"Oh, damn your common sense!" exclaimed Lawrence.

It was as laconic a warning-off as civility allowed: and it
irritated Lawrence beyond bearing to be rebuked by young
Stafford, whose social life stood in his danger, whom he could at
pleasure strip to universal crucifying shame. But there was
neither defiance nor fear in Val: tranquil and unpretentious, in
his force of character he reminded Lawrence of Laura Clowes. She
too had been attacked once or twice that evening by her husband,
and Lawrence had admired the way in which she either foiled or
evaded the rapier point, or took it to her bosom without
flinching. This same silken courage, it seemed, Val also
possessed. Both would stand up to a blow with the same grave
dignity and--perhaps--secret scorn.

Minutes p