Perforce he must advance to the three or four remaining flag-stones. Quickly, to get it over without danger, he hurried with a long stride on to the stone that meant ‘Love,’ eager to leap to the next. But the unconscious Isabel was quicker. As his foot was set on ‘Love,’ Isabel jumped untidily from the carriage. Kingston laughed internally. ‘So much for fate,’ he thought; then, calmed again, he advanced with Gundred to meet the stranger. In the flickering light, among the draughts that swirled in the high cavern of darkness, his first impression was of a limp, floppy hat, bulged, overtrodden boots, and a deplorable draggled tippet. Greetings were hurriedly exchanged, and Kingston felt justified of all his hostile forebodings. Awkward, shapeless, inopportune, tawdry,--‘Contempt’ or ‘Hate’ should certainly have been his footing with regard to Isabel Darrell. CHAPTER VII It was not till the three had arrived in the oaken parlour of the old chapel wing that Kingston could pause to take stock of the new-comer, and revise his first impression. Revise it? It needed only to be amplified, many new details to be added to the first rough sketch of his dislike, fresh lines and shades to be stippled in on the displeasing portrait. Gundred was one of the comparatively few Englishwomen whose hat always looks as if it had grown with her hair, and forms an integral part of her head as Nature made it. Isabel, on the other hand, was one of the vast majority whose hat sits on their hair awkwardly, like a stranger, with no suggestion of anything more than an accidental and reluctant relationship painfully achieved with pins. And it was a bad hat, too--formless, flabby, large and slatternly in its lines. It made no pretence at being straight, but flapped and floundered distressingly as she walked. Clearly Isabel was one of those women who can never keep a hat straight. Regiments of daggers and skewers cannot prevent them from giving the impression of living perpetually in a gale. Their headgear is aimless, uncongenial, offering a perpetual suggestion of irrelevance. And, as the hat is symptomatic of the woman, the rest of Isabel fulfilled the dire promise of her headgear--immense, shapeless, foolishly waved and undulated, of limp, coarse black straw, with the big bow of cheap satin that did not seem to belong to it, but to be stuck on casually with one of the protrusive, jetty pins that ironically pretended to keep it fixed, and, with it, sagged from side to side in a futile and disconsolately impudent manner. Isabel, throughout, was flimsy, loose, and flaccid in design. Nothing about her seemed to be in any relationship to herself or to any other detail of her dress: her attire was a mere careless aggregation of unsuitable elements, as depressing in its feeble slovenliness as a party of ill-assorted people. Her gown dragged and trailed around her here and there, suggesting that she daily tied it on anew with tapes, and