h. Wait half a minute and I'll run up with
you to the top of the glen."

Lawrence watched her wrap her charge carefully in a shawl, and
fetch milk from the dresser, and coax till Dorrie turned her
small head, heavy with the cares of neglected babyhood, sideways
on the old plaid maud and began to suck. Apparently he had
interrupted the scrubbing of the kitchen floor, for the tiles
were wet three quarters of the way over, and on a dry oasis stood
a pail, a scrubbing brush, and a morsel of soap. Among less
honourable odours he was glad to distinguish a good strong whiff
of carbolic.

Isabel meanwhile had recovered from her little fit of shyness.
She pulled off her apron and pulled down her skirt (it had been
kilted to the knee), rinsed her hands under a tap, wiped her face
with a wet handkerchief, and came out into the June sunshine
bareheaded, her long pigtail swinging between drilled and slender
shoulders. "Yours are London boots," she remarked as she
buttoned her cuff. "Do you mind going over the marsh?"

"Not at all."

"Not if you get your feet wet?" Lawrence laughed outright. "But
it's a real marsh!" said Isabel offended: "and you're not used to
mud, are you? You don't look as if you were." She pointed down
the glen, and Lawrence saw that some high spring, dammed at its
exit and turned back on itself, had filled the wide bottom with a
sponge of moss thickset with flowering rush and silken fluff of
cotton grass. "There's no danger in summertime, the shepherds
often cross it and so do I. Still if you're afraid--"

"I assure you I'm not afraid," said Lawrence, looking at her so
oddly that Isabel was not sure whether he was angry or amused.
Nor was Lawrence. She had struck out of his male vanity a
resentment so crude that he was ashamed of it, ashamed or even
shocked? He was not readily shocked. A pure cynic, he let into
his mind, on an easy footing, primitive desires that the average
man admits only behind a screen. Yet when these libertine
fancies played over Isabel's innocent head they were distasteful
to him: as he remembered once, in a Barbizon studio, to have
knocked a man down for a Gallic jest on the Queen of Heaven
although Luke's Evangel meant no more to him than the legend of
Eros and Psyche. But one can't knock oneself down--more's the
pity!

"Oh, all right," said Isabel impatiently. He was watching her
again! "But do look where you're going, this isn't Piccadilly.
You had better ho