t precise."
He had one hand in his pocket feeling among his loose silver:
tips are more easily given than thanks, especially when one is
not feeling grateful, and he was accustomed to pay his way
through the world with the facile profusion of a rich man. Still
he hesitated: if he had not the refined intuition that would have
made such a blunder impossible to Val Stafford, he had at all
events enough intelligence to hesitate. There is a coinage that
is safer than silver, and Lawrence thought it might well pass
current (now that she had washed her face) with this fair
schoolgirl of sixteen, ruffled by sun and wind and unaware of her
beauty. He would not confess to himself that the prospect of
Isabel's confusion pleased him.

He bent his head, smiling into Isabel's eyes. "You're a very kind
little girl. May I--?"

"No," said Isabel.

The blood sprang to her cheek, but she did not budge, not by a
hair's breadth. "I beg your pardon," said Lawrence, standing
erect. He had measured in that moment the extent of his error,
and he cursed, not for the first time, his want of perception,
which his ever-candid father had once called a streak of
vulgarity. Defrauded of the pleasure he had promised himself
from the contact of Isabel's smooth cheek, he grew suddenly very
tired of her. Young girls with their trick of attaching
importance to trifles are a nuisance!

He forced a smile. "I beg your pardon, I had no idea-- I see
you're ever so much older than I thought you were. Some day I
shall find my way up here again and you must let me make my peace
with a box of chocolates." He raised his hat--he had not done so
when she opened the door--and swung off across the moor, leaving
the vicar's daughter to go back and scrub Mrs. Drury's floor as
it had never been scrubbed before in its life. The honours of
the day lay with Isabel, but she was not proud of them, and her
face flamed for the rest of the morning. "You're worse than
Major Clowes!" she said violently to the kitchen tap.

CHAPTER IV

"How do?" Bernard Clowes was saying an hour later. "So good of
you to look us up."

Lawrence, coming down from his own room after brushing his muddy
clothes, met his cousin with a good humoured smile which covered
dismay. Heavens, what a wreck of manhood! And how chill it
struck indoors, and how dark, after the June sunshine on the
moor! Delicately he took the hand that Clowes held out to him--
but seized in a grip th