"No, she wouldn't want them to put him in an asylum," Isabel agreed, but in a subdued voice. "Did you forget my skirt?"
"No, but it was rather in a mess with the unfortunate Billy, and I'm afraid you'll have to do without it. I'm going to take you home now. You can walk, can't you, with my help? I'd like to carry you a few steps, till we're out of sight of the cottage. Put your arm round my neck." Isabel hesitated. She had been frightened out of her life and still felt cruelly shaken, but her quick sense of the ridiculous protested against this deference paid to her when she wasn't really hurt and it was all her own fault. What would Val have said? But apparently Captain Hyde was less exacting than Val. "Ah! let me: it is an ugly little scene outside and I don't want you to be haunted by it."
She resigned herself. She had not yet begun to feel shy of Lawrence, she was a child still, a child with the instincts of a woman, but those instincts all asleep. They quickened in her when she felt the glow of his life so near her own, but there was a touch of Miranda in Isabel, and no cautionary withdrawal followed.
And Lawrence? The trustfulness of a noble nature begets what it assumes. One need not ask what would have become of Miranda if she had given her troth to an unworthy Ferdinand, because the Mirandas of this world are rarely deceived. Hyde was but a battered Ferdinand. He was a man of strong and rather coarse fibre who had indifferently indulged tastes that he saw no reason to restrain. But he was changing: when he carried Isabel across the sunlit grass plot, her beautiful grave childish head lying warm on his shoulder, he had travelled far from the Hyde of the summer house at Bingley.
"My word!" said Yvonne Bendish, startled out of her drawl. "Is it you, Isabel?" She reined in and sat gazing with all her eyes at the couple coming down the field path to Chilmark Bridge. "Have you had an accident? What's happened?"
"Excuse my hat," said Lawrence with rather more than his habitual calm. "How lucky to have met you. There has been a shocking business up at Wancote. Perhaps you would take Miss Stafford home? She should be got to bed, I think."
Mrs. Jack Bendish was not soon ruffled, nor for long. "Lift her in," she said. "Sorry I can't make room for you too, Captain Hyde, you are as white as a ghost. Very upsetting, isn't it? but don't worry, girls of her age turn faint rather easily. Her arm hurt? . . ." She pointed down the road with her whip. "Dr. Verney lives at The Laburnus, on the right, beyond the publichouse. If you would be so kind as to send him up to the vicarage?"
She whipped up her black ponies and was gone. Lawrence was grateful to her for asking no questions, but he would rather have taken Isabel direct to Val. Romance in bud requires a delicate hand. Now Mrs. Jack Bendish had all the bourgeois virtues except modesty and discretion.
CHAPTER X
The Wancote affair made a nine days' wonder in the Plain. Indeed it even got into the London papers, under such titles as "A Domestic Tragedy" or "Duel with a Dog": and, while the Morning Post added a thumbnail sketch of Captain Hyde's distinguished career, the Spectator took Ben as the text of a "middle" on "The Abuse of Asylum Administration in Rural Districts."