It was lucky for Val that he was able to enjoy this quiet hour, for it was soon over. When he crossed the turf to the diningroom window, the fire had burnt down into red embers and not much light 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."