Val had always held paternal rank, Captain Hyde had been introduced as Val’s late superior officer, and so Isabel had accepted him as Val’s contemporary, of the generation before her own.  But framed in the sunlit doorway, a very tall handsome man in undress, his coat thrown off, his trousers belted on his lean flanks, his wet shirt modelling itself over his powerful throat and shoulders and sticking to his ribs, Hyde might have been only six or seven and twenty:  and certainly his manner was not middle-aged!  Val’s language was refined enough for a curate, and even Rowsley in his young sister’s presence never went beyond a sarcenet oath; but Hyde’s frank fury was piquant to Isabel’s not very decorous taste.  When he came in, her pain and faintness began to diminish as if a stream of warm fresh life were flowing into her veins.

“Are you better, Miss Isabel?”

“Ever so much better, thank you.  Is—­is Clara—?”

Cool, grave, and tranquil, Lawrence took her hand.  “Clara is dead.”  He felt her trembling, and found a form of consolation which would have been slow to occur to his unprompted fancy.  “Better so, isn’t it?  She wouldn’t have been very happy after her husband’s trying to kill her.”

“No, she wouldn’t want them to put him in an asylum,” Isabel agreed, but in a subdued voice.  “Did you forget my skirt?”

“No, but it was rather in a mess with the unfortunate Billy, and I’m afraid you’ll have to do without it.  I’m going to take you home now.  You can walk, can’t you, with my help?  I’d like to carry you a few steps, till we’re out of sight of the cottage.  Put your arm round my neck.”  Isabel hesitated.  She had been frightened out of her life and still felt cruelly shaken, but her quick sense of the ridiculous protested against this deference paid to her when she wasn’t really hurt and it was all her own fault.  What would Val have said?  But apparently Captain Hyde was less exacting than Val.  “Ah! let me:  it is an ugly little scene outside and I don’t want you to be haunted by it.”

She resigned herself.  She had not yet begun to feel shy of Lawrence, she was a child still, a child with the instincts of a woman, but those instincts all asleep.  They quickened in her when she felt the glow of his life so near her own, but there was a touch of Miranda in Isabel, and no cautionary withdrawal followed.

And Lawrence?  The trustfulness of a noble nature begets what it assumes.  One need not ask what would have become of Miranda if she had given her troth to an unworthy Ferdinand, because the Mirandas of this world are rarely deceived.  Hyde was but a battered Ferdinand.  He was a man of strong and rather coarse fibre who had indifferently indulged tastes that he saw no reason to restrain.  But he was changing:  when he carried Isabel across the sunlit grass plot, her beautiful grave childish head lying warm on his shoulder, he had travelled far from the Hyde of the summer house at Bingley.