at made him wince. Clowes gave his curt
"Ha ha!"

"I can still use my arms, Lawrence. Don't be so timid, I shan't
break to pieces if I'm touched. It's only these legs of mine
that won't work. Awkward, isn't it? But never mind that now,
it's an old story. You had a mishap on the moor, the servants
tell me? Ah! while I think of it, let me apologize for leaving
you to walk from the station. Laura, my wife, you know, forgot
to send the car. By the by, you know her, don't you? She says
she met you once or twice before she married me."

Like most men who surrender to their temperaments, Lawrence was
as a rule well served by his intuitions. Now and again they
failed him as with Isabel, but when his mind was alert it was a
sensitive medium. He dropped with crossed knees into his chair
and glanced reflectively at Bernard Clowes, heu quantum
mutatus. . . . When the body was wrecked, was there not nine
times out of ten some corresponding mental warp? Bernard's
fluent geniality struck him as too good to be true--it was not
in Bernard's line: and why translate a close friendship into
"meeting once or twice"? Was Bernard misled or mistaken, or was
he laying a trap?--Not misled: the Laura Selincourt of Hyde's
recollection was not one to stoop to petty shifts.

"'Once or twice?'" Lawrence echoed: "Oh, much oftener than that!
Mrs. Clowes and I are old friends, at least I hoped we were. She
can't be so ungracious as to have forgotten me?"

"She seems to have, doesn't she?" Bernard with his inscrutable
smile let the question drop. "Just touch that bell, will you,
there's a good fellow? So sorry to make you dance attendance--
Hallo, here she is!"

Laura had been waiting in the parlour, under orders not to enter
till the bell rang. She had heard all, and wondered whether it
was innocence or subtlety that had walked in and out of Bernard's
trap. She remembered Hyde was much like other fourth-year
University men except that he was not egotistical and not shy:
he had altered away from his class, but in what direction it was
difficult to tell: there was no deciphering the pleasant
blankness of his features or the conventional smile in his black
eyes.

"I haven't seen you for fourteen years," she said, giving him her
hand. "Oh Lawrence, how old you make me feel!"

"Shall I swear you haven't changed? It would be a poor
compliment."

"And one I couldn't return. I shouldn't have known you, unless
it were by your