“And you stay on?  Quite right, if it suits your book.”  Unconsciously putting the worst construction on everything Val said or did, Lawrence’s conclusion was that probably Val, an amateur farmer, was paid, like Barry, twice what he was worth in the market.  “But it wouldn’t suit mine.  However, I don’t imagine Bernard will try it on with me.  I’m not Barry.  If he hits me I shall hit him back.”

“Oh, will you?” returned Val, invisibly amused.  “I’m not sure that wouldn’t be a good plan.  It has at least the merit of originality.  All the same I’m afraid Mrs. Clowes wouldn’t like it, she is a standing obstacle in the way of drastic measures.”

“But why do you want me to stay?” Lawrence asked more and more surprised.

“Well, here is what brought me up tonight, when I knew Bernard would be on his way to bed.  Will you—­” he leaned forward, his hands clasped between his knees—­“stick it out, whatever happens, for a week or two, and keep your eyes open?  Life at Wanhope isn’t all plain sailing.”

“Plain sailing for Bernard?”

“Or for his wife.”

“You speak as the friend of the house who sees both sides?”

“They’re forced on me.”

“I’ll stay as long as I’m comfortable,” said Lawrence, cynically frank.  “More I can’t promise.”

Val leant back with an imperceptible shrug.  He was disappointed but not surprised:  there was in Hyde a vein of hard selfishness—­ not a weakness, for the egoism which openly says “I will consult my own convenience first” is too scornful of public opinion to be called weak, but an acquired defensive quality on which argument would have been thrown away.  Val’s arm dropped inert, he was tired, not in body alone, but by the strain of contact with another mind, hostile, and pitiless, and dominant.

And Lawrence also was content to sit silent, lulled by the rising and falling murmur of the stream, and by that agreeably cruel memory. . . .  He had no inclination to recall it to Val, but it lent an emotional piquancy to their intercourse.  He had the whip hand of Val through the past, and perhaps the present also.  Lawrence had been struck by Val’s allusion to Mrs. Clowes.  He was the friend of the house, was he?  Now the position of a friend of the house who shields a wife from her husband is notoriously a delicate one.

Val roused himself.  “Well, we’ll drop this.  I must now say two words on a different subject:  I’d rather let it alone, and so I dare say would you, but we shall meet a good deal off and on while you’re here, and it had better be got over.  I’m sorry if I embarrass you—­”

“Set your mind at rest,” said Lawrence, silkenly brutal.  “You don’t embarrass me at all.”

He threw away his cigar and got up laughing, and as Val also rose Lawrence gently slapped him on the back.  “I know what you’re driving at—­that you’ve not forgotten that small indiscretion of yours, or ceased to regret it.  Don’t you worry, Val!  You always were one of the worrying sort, weren’t you?  But you need never refer to it again, and I won’t if you don’t.”  Surely a generous, a handsome offer!  But Stafford only touched with the tips of his fingers the ringed and manicured hand of the elder man.