assed. Val waited because he chose not to be the first
to break silence, Lawrence because he was absorbing fresh
impressions with that intensity which wipes out time and place.
He was in the mood to receive them: tired, softened, and
quickened, from the tears of the afternoon. After all Val was
Isabel's brother and possessed Isabel's eyes! This drew Lawrence
to him by a double cord: practically, because it is inconvenient
to be on bad terms with one's brother-in-law, and mystically,
because in his profound romantic passion he loved whatever was
associated with her, down to the very sprig of honeysuckle that
she had pinned into his coat. But for this cord his relations
with Stafford would have begun and ended in a casual regret for
the casual indulgence of a cruel impulse. But Isabel's brother
had ex officio a right of entry into Hyde's private life, and,
the doors once opened, he was dazed by the light that Val let in.

It was after ten o'clock and dews were falling, falling from a
clear night. "One faint eternal eventide of gems," beading the
dark turf underfoot and the pale faces of roses that had bloomed
all day in sunshine: now prodigal of scent only they hung their
heads like ghosts of flowers among dark glossy leaves. Stars
hung sparkling on the dark field of heaven, stars threw down
their spears on the dark river fleeting to the star-roofed
distant Channel. Stream and grass and leaf-buds were ephemeral
and eternal, ever passing and ever renewed, old as the stars, or
the waste ether in which they range: the green, sappy stem, the
dew-bead that hung on it, the shape of a ripple were the same now
as when Nineveh was a queen of civilization and men's flesh was
reddening alive in osier cages over altar fires on Wiltshire
downs. And all the sweetness, all the romance of an English
midsummer night seized the heart of Lawrence, a nomad, a returned
exile, and a man in love--as if he had never known England
before.

Or her inhabitants either! Lawrence, without country, creed,
profession, or territorial obligation, was one of those sons of
rich men who form, in any social order, its loosest and most
self-centred class. In his set, frank egoism was the only motive
for which one need not apologize. But in Chilmark it was not
so. Far other forces were in play in the lives of the Stafford
family, and Laura Clowes, and Lord Grantchester and his wife and
Jack Bendish. What were these forces? Lawrence thought in