the borders the velvet bodies of bees hung
between the velvet petals, ruby-red, of dahlias. There had been
no frost, and yet a foreboding of frost was in the air, a
sparkle, a sting--enough to have braced Lawrence when he went
down to bathe before breakfast, standing stripped amid long
river-herbage drenched in dew, a west wind striking cold on his
wet limbs: sensations exquisite so long as the blood of health
and manhood glowed under the chilled skin! It was early autumn.

Time slips away fast in a country village, and Lawrence remained
a welcome guest at Wanhope, where Chilmark said--though with a
covert smile--that Captain Hyde had done his cousin a great deal
of good. Bernard was better behaved with Lawrence than with any
one else, less surly, less unsociable, less violently coarse:
since June there had been fewer quarrels with Val and Barry and
the servants, and less open incivility to Laura. He had even
let Laura give a few mild entertainments, arrears of hospitality
which she was glad to clear off: and he had appeared at them in
person, polite and well dressed, and on the friendliest terms
with his cousin and his wife.

Lawrence knew his own mind now. It was because he knew it that
he held his hand: meeting Isabel two or three times a week,
entering into the life of the little place because it was her
life, fighting Val's battle with Bernard--and winning it--
because Val was her brother. When he remembered his collapse he
was not abashed: shame was an emotion which he rarely felt: but
he had gone too far and too fast, and was content to mark time in
a more rational and conventional courtship.

But a courtship under the rose, for before others he hid his love
like a crime, treating Isabel as good humoured elderly men treat
pretty children. Where the astringent memory of Lizzie came
into play, Lawrence was dumb. The one aspect of that fiasco
which he had not fully confessed to Isabel--though only because
it was not then prominent in his mind--was its scorching, its
lacerating effect on his pride. But for it he would probably
have flung discretion to the winds, confided in Laura, in
Bernard, in Val, pursued Isabel with a hot and headstrong
impetuosity: but it had left the entire tract of sex in him one
seared and branded scar.

Even when they were alone together, which rarely happened--Val
saw to that--he had as yet made no open love to her: it was
difficult to do so when one was never secure fro