h they soon fell again with a flutter of
the sensitive eyelids. "Are you tired, sweetheart?"

"Oh no, thank you."

"Cold?"

"Not now."

"Frightened?"

"A little."

"You wouldn't rather I left you for a little while?"

Isabel almost imperceptibly shook her head, but with a shade of
mockery in her smile which prevented Lawrence from taking her in
his arms. "Am I an unsatisfactory wife? Will you soon be tired
of me? No, not yet," she said, moving away from him to put down
her gloves and muff. "I've hardly had time to thank you for my
presents yet. Oh Lawrence, how you spoil me!" She held up her
watch to admire the lettering on its Roman enamel. "'I.H.' Does
that stand for me--am I really Isabel Hyde? And are those
sapphires mine, and can I drink my tea out of this roseleaf
Dresden cup? It does seem strange that saying a few words and
writing one's name in a book should make so much difference."

"Regretful?"

"A little oppressed, that's all. I shall soon get used to it.
If you were not you I should hate it. But there's something
essentially generous and careless in you, Lawrence, that makes it
easy to take from you. Come here." He came to her. "Oh, I've
made you blush!" said Isabel, naively surprised. Under her rare
and unexpected praise he had coloured against his will. "Oh
foolish one!" She kissed him sweetly. "Lawrence, are you sorry
Val died?" Lawrence freed himself and turned away. It was six
months since Val's death, but he still could not bear to think of
it and he had scarcely spoken of it to Isabel.

There had been no protracted farewell for Val. He had died in
Lawrence's arms on the steps of Wanhope without recovering
consciousness, while Verney stood by helpless, and Isabel, by a
stroke of irony, tried to convince poor agonized Laura Clowes
that the law should not touch her husband. It had not done so.
He had been saved mainly by the unscrupulous concerted perjury of
Lawrence and Selincourt, who swore that Val had stumbled and
fallen by accident with the dagger in his hand, while Verney
confined himself to drily agreeing that the wound might have been
self-inflicted. In the absence of any contrary evidence the lie
was allowed to pass, but perhaps it would hardly have done so if
it had not been universally taken for a half-truth. The day
before the inquest there appeared in the Gazette a laconic notice
that Second Lieutenant Valentine Ormsby Stafford, late of the
Dorchester