at it signifies," said Val. Mrs. Clowes
wouldn't have accepted if it weren't all right. I don't see that
you or I need worry if she doesn't. Isabel is old enough to pour
out tea for herself. In any case, as it happens, you'll be here
if I'm not, and I dare say Jimmy will look in for ten minutes."

"You are sweet, Val," said Isabel gratefully.

"Oh I don't say Rowsley's not right! Prigs generally are: and
besides now I come to think of it, Laura did look faintly amused
when I asked her. But these stupid things never occur to me till
afterwards! After all, what am I to do? I can't manufacture a
chaperon, and it would be very bad for the parish if the vicar
never entertained. And it's not as if Captain Hyde were a young
man; he's thirty-six if he's a day."

CHAPTER III

When the sea retreats after a storm one finds on the beach all
sorts of strange flotsam. Bernard Clowes was a bit of human
wreckage left on the sands of society by the storm of the war.
When it broke out he was a second lieutenant in the Winchester
Regiment, a keen polo player and first class batsman who rarely
opened a book. He was sent out with the First Division and
carried himself with his usual phlegmatic good humour through
almost four years of fighting from Mons to Cambrai.

In the March break-through he had his wrist broken by a rifle-bullet
and was invalided home, where he took advantage of his leave to get
married, partly because most of the men he knew were already married,
and partly to please his sister. There were no other brothers, and
Mrs. Morrison, a practical lady, but always a little regretful of her
own marriage with Morrison's Boot and Shoe Company, recommended him
with the family bluntness to arrange for an olive branch before the
Huns got him.

Laura, a penniless woman two years his senior and handicapped by
her disreputable belongings, was not the wife Gertrude Morrison
would have chosen for him: still it might have been worse, for
Laura was well-born and personally irreproachable, while Clowes,
hot-blooded and casual, was as likely as not to have married a
chorus-girl. If any disappointment lingered, Gertrude soothed
it by trying over in her own mind the irritation that she would
be able to produce in Morrison circles: "Where he met her?
Oh, when she was staying with her married sister at Castle
Wharton . . . .Yvonne, the elder Selincourt girl, married into
the Bendish family."

Bernard did not care a st