maternity. But the man, what would he do? How could she provide for him,
how avert those shattering black moods of his, which destroyed them both?

She sighed with fear. But at this time Bertie Reid wrote to Isabel. He
was her old friend, a second or third cousin, a Scotchman, as she was a
Scotchwoman. They had been brought up near to one another, and all her
life he had been her friend, like a brother, but better than her own
brothers. She loved him--though not in the marrying sense. There was a
sort of kinship between them, an affinity. They understood one another
instinctively. But Isabel would never have thought of marrying Bertie. It
would have seemed like marrying in her own family.

Bertie was a barrister and a man of letters, a Scotchman of the
intellectual type, quick, ironical, sentimental, and on his knees before
the woman he adored but did not want to marry. Maurice Pervin was
different. He came of a good old country family--the Grange was not a
very great distance from Oxford. He was passionate, sensitive, perhaps
over-sensitive, wincing--a big fellow with heavy limbs and a forehead
that flushed painfully. For his mind was slow, as if drugged by the
strong provincial blood that beat in his veins. He was very sensitive to
his own mental slowness, his feelings being quick and acute. So that he
was just the opposite to Bertie, whose mind was much quicker than his
emotions, which were not so very fine.

From the first the two men did not like each other. Isabel felt that they
_ought_ to get on together. But they did not. She felt that if only each
could have the clue to the other there would be such a rare understanding
between them. It did not come off, however. Bertie adopted a slightly
ironical attitude, very offensive to Maurice, who returned the Scotch
irony with English resentment, a resentment which deepened sometimes into