unmarried man, who would be available to ride with her or make a
fourth at bridge--and there by good luck was Val Stafford ready
to hand. Born and reared in the country, though young and
untrained, Val brought to his job a wide casual knowledge of
local conditions and a natural head for business, and was only
too glad to squire Laura in the hunting field. For Laura must
hunt: as Laura Selincourt she had hunted whenever she was offered
a mount, and she was to go on doing as she had always done.
Laura would rather not have hunted, for the freshness of her
youth was gone and the strain of her life left her permanently
tired, and she pleaded first expense, then propriety. "Don't be
a damned fool," replied Bernard Clowes. So Laura went riding
with Val Stafford.

"Come in," said Major Clowes in a rasping snarl, and Laura came
into her husband's room and stumbled over a chair. The windows
were shuttered and the room was still dark at eleven o'clock of a
fine June morning. Laura, irrepressibly annoyed, groped her way
through a disorder of furniture, which seemed, as furniture
always does in the dark, to be out of place and malevolently full
of corners, and without asking leave flung down a shutter and
flung up a window. In a field across the river they were cutting
hay, and the dry summer smell of it breathed in, and with it the
long rolling whirr of a haymaking machine and its periodical
clash, most familiar of summer noises. And the June daylight lit
up the gaunt body of Bernard Clowes stretched out on a water
mattress, his silk jacket unbuttoned over his strong, haggard
throat. "Really, Berns," said Laura, flinging down a second
shutter, "I don't wonder you sleep badly. The room is positively
stuffy! I should have a racking headache if I slept in it."