I
shouldn't care if I never saw one of them again."

Isabel laughed. "I said you wouldn't play fair."

"Don't you believe me?"

"No, of course not. You wouldn't say it if it were true."

Lawrence drew a deep breath and looked away. Their nook of turf was
out of sight of the house, sheltered from it behind a great thicket
of lilac and syringa, which walled off the lawn from the kitchen
garden full of sweet-smelling currant bushes and apple-trees laden
with green fruit. The sleepy air was alive with gilded wasps, and
between the stiffly-drooping apple-branches, with their coarse
foliage, and the pencilled frieze of stonecrop and valerian waving
along the low stone boundarywall, there was a dim honey-coloured
expanse that stretched away like an inland sea, where, the afternoon
sunshine lay in a yellow haze over brown and yellow and blue tracts
of the Plain. Nothing was to be heard but the drone of wings near at
hand and the whirr of a haycutter far down in the valley. No one was
near and summer lay heavy on the land.

"I did care once. . I had a bad smash in my life when I was
little more than a boy." He dragged a heavy gold band from his
finger. "That was my wedding ring."

"Oh ... I'm sorry!" faltered Isabel. She was stunned by the
extraordinary confidence.

"I married out of my class. It was when I was at Cambridge. She
was a beautiful girl but she was not a lady. Her father was a
tobacconist in the Cury, and Lizzie liked to serve in the shop.
As she didn't want to lose her character nor I my degree, we
compromised on secret nuptials. I took a house for her in Newham
where I could go and visit her. I ought not to tell you the rest
of the story."

"Oh yes, you can," said Isabel simply. "I hear all sorts of
stories in the village."

So childish in some ways, so mature in others, she saw that
Lawrence was longing to unbosom himself, and her instinct was to
listen quietly, for, after all, this, though the strangest, was
not the first such confidence that had been poured into her ear.
She and her brother Val were alike in occasionally hearing
secrets that had never been told to any one else. Why? Probably
because they never gave advice, never moralized, never thought of
themselves at all but only of the friend in distress. Isabel took
Hyde's hand and held it closely, palm to palm. "Tell me all
about it."

"There was another fellow at Trinity who had been in the Sixth at
Eton with me, a year olde