n 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