easy," she found a
momentary difficulty in controlling her voice, "but he's my
husband and I shall stick to him. The more so for being deeply
conscious that a different woman might manage him better. No I
don't mind your saying it. Oh, how often I've felt the truth of
it! But, such as I am, I'm all he has."

"You're a thousand times too good for him. Why are you so good?"

"I'm not good and no more is Lulu." Mrs. Bendish sighed,
impressed perhaps by Laura's alien moralities, certainly by her
determination. "However, if you won't you won't, and in a way
I'm glad, selfishly that is, because of Jack's people. But in
that case, dear girl, do get rid of Lawrence! The situation
strikes me as fraught with danger. One of those situations where
every one says something's sure to happen, and then they're all
flabbergasted when it does."

"Bernard is not a formidable enemy," said Mrs. Clowes drily.
"But, yes, Lawrence must go. I'll speak to him tomorrow."

"Why not today?"

"It would spoil our evening."

"Give it up."

"And disappoint Isabel?"

"I don't like it."

"Nor I. But I was forced into it, and I can't break my word to
Lawrence and the child. After all, there's no great odds between
today and tomorrow. What can happen in twenty-four hours?"

CHAPTER XIII

In after life, when Isabel was destined to look back on that day
as the last day of her youth, she recalled no part of it more
clearly than wandering up to her own room after an early tea to
dress, and flinging herself down on her bed instead of dressing.
She slept next to Val. But while Val's room, sailor-like in
its neatness, was bare as any garret and got no sun at all,
Isabel's was comfortable in a shabby way and faced south and west
over the garden: an autumn garden now, bathed in westering
sunshine, fortified from the valley by a carved gold height of
beech trees, open on every other side over sunburnt moorland pale
and rough as a stubble-field in its autumn feathering of light
brown grasses and seedling flowers aflicker in a west wind.
Tonight however Isabel saw nothing of it, she lay as if asleep,
her face hidden in her pillow: she, the most active person in the
house, who was never tired like Val nor lazy like Rowsley!
Conscience pricked her, but she was muffled so thick in happiness
that she scarcely felt it: the fancies that floated into her mind
frightened her, and yet they were too sweet to banish: and then
after all wer