g, companionable silence. "Why
didn't you remind me?"

"Because I didn't want it. Don't you worry: I'll look after
myself. I always do. I'm a charming guest, no trouble to any
one."

"At least have a cigarette while you're waiting for lunch! I'm
sorry to have none to offer you."

"Don't you smoke now? You did at Farringay."

"No, I've given it up. I never much cared for it, and Bernard
does so hate to see a woman smoking. He is very old-fashioned in
some ways."

"And do you always do as Bernard likes?" Lawrence asked with an
impertinence so airy that it left Laura no time to be offended.
"--It was a great shock to me to find him so helpless. Is he
always like that?"

"He can never get about, if that's what you mean." It was not all
Hyde meant, but Laura had not the heart to repress him; she felt
that thrill of guilty joy which we all feel when some one says
for us what we are too magnanimous to say for ourselves. "He
lies indoors all day smoking and reading quantities of novels."

"Fearfully sad. Very galling to the temper. But there are a lot
of modern mechanical appliances, aren't there, that ought to make
him fairly independent?"

"He won't touch any of them."

"Sick men have their whims. But can't you drag him out into the
sun? He ought not to lie in that mausoleum of a hall."

"He has never been in the garden in all our years at Wanhope."

Lawrence took off his straw hat to fan himself with. It was not
only the heat of the day that oppressed him. "Poor, wretched
Bernard! But I dare say I should be equally mulish if I were in
his shoes. By the by, was he really in pain just now?"

"Really in pain?" Laura echoed. "Why--why should you say that?"
She no longer doubted Lawrence Hyde's subtlety. "'He's
constantly in pain and he scarcely ever complains."

"Oh? I didn't know one suffered, with paralysis."

"He has racking neuritis in his shoulders and back."

"That's bad. I'm afraid he can't be much up to entertaining
visitors. Does he hate having me here?"

"No! oh no! I know he sometimes seems a little odd," said poor
Laura, wishing her guest were less clear-sighted: and yet before
he came she had been hoping that Lawrence would divine the less
obvious aspects of the situation, and perhaps, since a man can do
more with a man like Bernard than any woman can, succeed in
easing it. "But can you wonder? Struck down like this at five
and twenty! and he never was keen on indoor inte