Then he saw that Bernard was struggling to turn over on his side, flapping about with his slow uncouth gestures like a bird with a broken wing.  “Let me—!” Laura’s “No, Lawrence!” came too late.  Hyde had taken the cripple in his arms, lifting him like a child:  “You’re light for your height,” he said softly.  He was as strong as Barry and as gentle as Val Stafford.  Laura had turned perfectly white.  She fully expected Clowes to strike his cousin.  She could hardly believe her eyes when with a great gasp of relief he flung his arm round Hyde’s neck and lay back on Hyde’s shoulder.  “Thanks, that’s damned comfortable—­first easy moment I’ve had since last night,” he murmured:  then, to Laura, “we must persuade this fellow to stop on a bit.  You’re not in a hurry to get off, are you, Lawrence?”

“Not I. I’ll stay as long as you and Laura care to keep me.”

“I and Laura, hey?”

Bernard’s flush faded:  he slipped from Hyde’s arm.

“H’m, yes, you’re old friends, aren’t you?  Met at Farringay?  I’d forgotten that.”  He shut his eyes.  “And Laura’s dying to renew the intimacy.  It’s dull for her down here.  Take him into the garden, Lally.  You’ll excuse me now, Lawrence, I can’t talk long without getting fagged.  Wretched state of things, isn’t it?  I’m a vile bad host but I can’t help it.  At the present moment for example I’m undergoing grinding torments and it doesn’t amuse me to make conversation, so you two can cut along and disport yourselves in any way you like.  Give Lawrence a drink, will you, my love? . . . .  Oh no, thanks, you’ve done a lot but you can’t do any more, no one can, I just have to grin and bear it.  Laura, would you mind ringing for Barry?  I’m not sure I shall show up again before dinner-time.  It’s no end good of you, old chap, to come to such a beastly house. . .”

He pursued them with banal gratitude till they were out of earshot, when Lawrence drew a deep breath as if to throw off some physical oppression.  Under the weathered archway, down the flagged steps and over the lawn. . . .  How still it was, and how sweet!  The milk-blooms in the spire of the acacia were beginning to turn faintly brown, but its perfume still hung in the valley air, mixed with the honey-heavy breath of a great white double lime tree on the edge of the stream.  There were no dense woods at Wanhope, the trees were set apart with an airy and graceful effect, so that one could trace the course of their branches; and between them were visible hayfields from which the hay had recently been carried, and the headlands of the Plain—­fair sunny distances, the lowlands bloomed over with summer mist, the uplands delicately clear like those blue landscapes that in early Italian pictures lie behind the wheel of Saint Catherine or the turrets of Saint Barbara.

“A sweet pretty place you have here.  I was in China nine weeks ago.  Everlasting mud huts and millet fields.  I must say there’s nothing to beat an English June.”