t came in from out of doors under that low ceiling, but there
was enough to show him Isabel in Lawrence's arms. Fatality! He
had not foreseen it, not for a moment: and yet directly he saw it
he seemed to have known it all along. After a momentary
suspension of his faculties, during which his ideas shifted much
as they do when an unfamiliar turns into a familiar road, Val
tapped on the glass and strolled in, giving his young sister one
of his light teasing smiles. "Am I to bestow my consent,
Isabel?"

"Oh Val!-- Don't be angry, or not with Lawrence anyhow, it wasn't
his fault."

Isabel disengaged herself but without confusion. Her brother
watched her in increasing surprise. Rosy and sparkling, she
seemed to have grown from child to woman in an hour, as after a
late spring the first hot day brings a million buds into leaf.

"Are you startled?" she asked, holding up her cheek for a kiss.

"Not so much so as I should have been twenty-four hours ago. No,
I didn't guess--not a bit; I suppose brothers never expect
people to want to marry their sisters. We know too much about
you."

"Better run off to the nursery, Isabel," said Lawrence. Isabel
made him a little smiling curtsey eloquent of her disdain--it
was so like Captain Hyde to be saucy before Val!--and slipped
away. When Lawrence returned after holding open the door for her,
he found a certain difficulty in meeting Val's eyes.

"And this then is the mysterious attraction that has kept you at
Wanhope all the summer? Wonderful! What will Mrs. Jack say?
But I suppose nineteen, for forty, has a charm of its own."

Lawrence was not forty. But he refused to be drawn. "She is
very beautiful."

"Oh, very," Val was nothing if not cordial. "But her face is her
fortune. I needn't ask if you can keep her in the state to which
she's accustomed," his eye wandered over the dilapidated vicarage
furniture, "or whether your attentions are disinterested.
Evidently you're one of those men who like their wives to be
dependent on them-- Dear me!"

"Damn the money!" said Lawrence at white heat. "Jew I may be,
but it's you and Isabel that harp on it, not I."

"Come, come!" Val arched his eyebrows. "So sorry to ruffle you,
but these questions are in all the etiquette books and some one
has to ask them. If you could look on me as Isabel's father--?"

It was too much. Angry as he was, Lawrence began to laugh. "No,
I won't look on you as Isabel's father," he had re