"If he had been English he would have deserved to be shot," said Isabel briefly: then, reverting to a subject in which she was far more deeply interested, "Rowsley—my second brother—said I wasn't to cross-examine you: but it was a great temptation, because one never can get anything out of Val. And after all we've the right to be proud of him! Even then, when every one was so brave, you would say, wouldn't you, that Val earned his distinction? It really was what the Gazette called it, 'conspicuous gallantry'?"
"It was a daring piece of work," said Lawrence, reddening to his hair. He fought down a sensation so unfamiliar that he could scarcely put a name to it, and forced himself on: "We were all proud of him and we none of us forget it. Don't tell him I said so, though. It isn't etiquette. You won't think I'm trying to minimize what Val did, will you, if I say that we who were through the fighting saw so many horrible and ghastly things . . ." Again his voice failed. He was aware of Isabel's bewilderment, but he was seeing more ghosts than he had seen in all the intervening years of peace, and they came between him and the sunlit landscape and Isabel's young eyes. War! always war! human bodies torn to rags in a moment, and the flowers of the field wet with a darker moisture than rain: the very smell of the trenches was in his nostrils, their odour of blood and decay. What in heaven's name had brought it all back, and, stranger still, what had moved him to speak of it and to betray feelings whose very existence was unknown to him and which he had never betrayed before?
The silence was brief though to Lawrence it seemed endless. He drove the ghosts back to quarters and finished quietly: "Well, we won't talk about that, it's not a pleasant subject. Only give Val my love and tell him if he doesn't look me up soon I shall come and call on him. We're much too old friends to stand on ceremony."
"All right, I will," said Isabel.
There was a shrub of juniper close by, and she felt under its sharp branches. "Do you like honeysuckle?" She held up a fresh sprig fragrant with its pale horns, which she had tracked to covert by its scent. Lawrence was not given to wearing buttonholes, but he understood the friendly and apologetic intention and inclined his broad shoulder for Miss Stafford to pass the stem through the lapel of his coat. Isabel had not intended to pin it in for him, but she was generally willing to do what was expected of her. She took a pin from her own dress (there were plenty in it), and fastened the flower deftly on the breast of Captain Hyde's white jacket.
And so standing before him, her head bent over her task, she unwittingly left Lawrence free to observe the texture of her skin, bloomed over with down like a peach, and the curves of her young shoulders, a little inclined to stoop, as young backs often are in the strain of growth, but so firm, so fresh, so white under the thin stuff of her bodice: below her silken plaits, on the nape of her neck, a curl or two of hair grew in close rings, so fine that it was almost indistinguishable from its own shadow. Swiftly, without warning, Lawrence was aware of a pleasurable commotion in his veins, a thrill that shook through him like a burst of gay music. This experience was not novel, he had felt it three or four times before in his life, and on the spot, while it was sending gentle electric currents to his finger-tips, he was able to analyse its origin—item, to warm weather and laziness after the strain of his Chinese journey, so much: item, to Isabel's promise of beauty, so much: item, to the disparity between her age and his own, to her ignorance and immaturity, the bloom on the untouched fruit, so much more. But there was this difference between the present and previous occasions when he had fallen or thought of falling in love, that he desired no victory: no, it was he and not Isabel who was to capitulate, leaning his forehead upon her young hand. . . . And he had never seen her till that morning, and the child was nineteen, the daughter of a country vicarage, brought up to wear calico and to say her prayers! more, she was Val Stafford's sister, and she loved her brother. Lawrence gave himself a gentle shake. At six and thirty it is time to put away childish things. "Thank you very much. Is that Mrs. Clowes calling us?"
It was Laura Clowes and Yvonne Bendish, and Lawrence, as he strolled back with Isabel to the garden gate, had an uneasy suspicion that the episode of the honeysuckle had been overseen. Laura was graver than usual, while Yvonne had a sardonic spark in her eye. "I'm afraid it's no use waiting any longer, Isabel," said Laura.
"What do you think, Lawrence? It's after six o'clock."
"Hasn't Val come?" said Isabel.
"No, he must have been kept at Countisford. It's a long ride for him on such a hot day. Perhaps Mrs. Bishop made him stay to tea."