"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 regained the advantage of age and position, neutralized till now by Val's cooler self-restraint. "I won't look on you as anything but a brother-in-law; a younger brother of my own, Val, if you can support the relation. Won't you start fresh with me? I've not given you much cause to think well of me up to now, but I love Isabel, and I'll do my best to make her happy. I might find forgiveness difficult if I were you, but then," for his life he could not have said whether he was in earnest or chaffing Val, "I'm a Jew of Shylock's breed and you're a Christian."
"But, my dear fellow, what is there to forgive? We're only too delighted and grateful for the honour done us: it's a brilliant match, of course, far better than she could expect to make." A duller man than Lawrence could not have missed the secret silken mischief. "And to me, to all of us, you're more than kind; it's nice to feel that instead of losing a sister I shall gain a brother."
"You are an infernal prig, Val!"
"Oh," said Val, this time without irony, "It's easy for you to come with an apology in one hand and a cheque in the other."
He turned away and stood looking out into the garden. In the lilac bushes over the lawn Isabel's robin was still singing his winter carol, and the atmosphere was saturated with the smell of wet, dead leaves, the poignant, fatal smell of autumn. "There's winter in the air tonight," said Val half aloud.
"What?" said Lawrence startled.
"I say that life's too short for quarrelling." He held out his hand. "But be gentle with her, she is very young.— Yes, what is it, Fanny?"
"Major Clowes's compliments, sir, and he would be glad to see
Captain Hyde as soon as convenient."
At Wanhope half an hour later the sun had gone down behind a bank of purple fog, and cloud after cloud had put off its vermilion glow and faded into a vague dimness of twilight: house and garden were quiet, except for the silver rippling of the river which went on and on, ceaselessly fleeting over shallows or washing along through faded sedge. These river murmurs haunted Wanhope all day and night, and so did the low river-mists: in autumn by six o'clock the grass was already ankle deep and white as a field of lilies.