be jolly to have one's mind stored full of
queer foreign adventures and foreign landscapes to think about in
odd moments, even if it were only millet fields."

"I've no ties, you see, nothing to keep me in England. Come to
think of it, Bernard is my nearest male relative, since my father
died five years ago."

"I heard of that and wanted to write to you, but I wasn't sure of
your address"

"I was in Peru. They cabled to me to come home when he was taken
ill, but I was up country and missed it. The first news I had
was a second cable announcing his death. It was unlucky."

"For both of you," said Laura gently, "if it meant that he was alone
when he died." Sincere herself, Mrs. Clowes exacted from her friends
either sincerity or silence, and her sweet half-melancholy smile
pierced through Hyde's conventional regrets. He was silent, a little
confused.

They were near the river now, and in the pale shadow of the lime
tree Laura sat down on a bench, while Hyde threw himself on a
patch of sunlit turf at her feet. Most men of his age would have
looked clumsy in such an unbuttoned attitude, but Hyde was an
athlete still, and Laura, who was fond of sketching, admired his
vigorous grace. She felt intimate with him already: she was not
shy nor was Lawrence, but this was an intimacy of sympathy that
went deeper than the mere trained ease of social intercourse: she
could be herself with him: she could say whatever she liked.
And, looking back on the old days which she had half forgotten,
Laura remembered that she had always felt the same freedom from
constraint in Hyde's company: she had found it pleasant fourteen
years ago, when she was young and had no reserves except a
natural delicacy of mind, and it was pleasant still, but strange,
after the isolating adventure of her marriage. Perhaps she would
not now have felt it so strongly, if he had not been her
husband's cousin as well as her friend.

She sat with folded hands watching Lawrence with a vague, observant
smile. Drilled to a stately ease and worn down to a lean hardihood
by his life of war and wandering, he was, like his cousin, a big,
handsome man, but distinguished by the singular combination of black
eyes and fair hair. Was there a corresponding anomaly in his
temperament? He looked as though he had lived through many
experiences and had come out of them fortified with philosophy--that
easy negative philosophy of a man of the world, for which death is