The Project Gutenberg eBook,
Elizabeth's Campaign,
by Mrs. Humphrey Ward,
Illustrated by C. Allan Gilbert

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ELIZABETH

ELIZABETH'S

CAMPAIGN

BY

MRS. HUMPHRY WARD

AUTHOR OF
LADY ROSE'S DAUGHTER, MISSING, ETC.

FRONTISPIECE IN COLOR BY

C. ALLAN GILBERT

1918

TO THE DEAR AND GALLANT
MEMORY
OF
T. S. A.
PASSCHENDAELE, OCTOBER 11, 1917

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FOREWORD

This book was finished in April 1918, and represents the mood of a supremely critical moment in the war.

M. A. W.

CHAPTERS: [ I] , [ II ], [ III ], [ IV ], [ V ], [ VI ], [ VII ], [ VIII ], [ IX ], [ X ], [ XI ], [ XII ], [ XIII ], [ XIV ], [ XV ], [ XVI ], [ XVII ]

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ELIZABETH'S CAMPAIGN

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CHAPTER I

'Remember, Slater, if I am detained, that I am expecting the two gentlemen from the War Agricultural Committee at six, and Captain Mills of the Red Cross is coming to dine and sleep. Ask Lady Chicksands to look after him in case I am late—and put those Tribunal papers in order for me, by the way. I really must go properly into that Quaker man's case—horrid nuisance! I hope to be back in a couple of hours, but I can't be sure. Hullo, Beryl! I thought you were out.'

The speaker, Sir Henry Chicksands, already mounted on his cob outside his own front door, turned from his secretary, to whom he had been giving these directions, to see his only daughter hurrying through the inner hall with the evident intention of catching her father before he rode off.

She ran down the steps, but instead of speaking at once she began to stroke and pat his horse's neck, as though doubtful how to put what she had to say.

'Well, Beryl, what's the matter?' said her father impatiently. The girl, who was slender and delicate in build, raised her face to his.

'Are you—are you really going to Mannering, father?'

'I am—worse luck!'

'You'll handle him gently, won't you?' There was anxiety in the girl's voice. 'But of course you will—I know you will.'

Chicksands shrugged his shoulders.

'I shall do my best. But you know as well as I do that he's a queer customer when it comes to anything connected with the war.'

The girl looked behind her to make sure that the old butler of the house had retired discreetly out of earshot.

'But he can't quarrel with you, father!'

'I hope not—for your sake.'

'Must you really tackle him?'

'Well, I thought I was the person to do it. It's quite certain nobody else could make anything of it.'

Privately Beryl disagreed, but she made no comment.

'Aubrey seems to be pretty worried,' she said, in a depressed tone, as she turned away.

'I don't wonder. He should have brought up his father better. Well, good-bye, dear. Don't bother too much.'

She waved her hand to him as he made off, and stood watching him from the steps—a gentle, attaching figure, her fair hair and the pale oval of her face standing out against the panelled hall behind her.

Her father went his way down a long winding hill beyond his own grounds, along a country road lined with magnificent oaks, through a village where his practised eye noted several bad cottages with disapproval, till presently he slackened his horse's pace, as he passed an ill-looking farm about half a mile beyond the village.

'Not a decent gate in the whole place!' he said to himself with disgust. 'And the farm buildings only fit for a bonfire. High time indeed that we made Mannering sit up!'

He paused also to look over the neighbouring hedge at some fields literally choked with weeds.

'And as for Gregson—lazy, drunken fellow! Why didn't he set some village women on? Just see what they've done on my place! Hullo, here he is! Now I'm in for it!' For he saw a slouching man coming rapidly towards him from the farmyard, with the evident intention of waylaying him. The man's shabby, untidy dress and blotched complexion did not escape Sir Henry's quick eye. 'Seems to have been making a night of it,' was his inward comment.

'Good-day, Sir Henry,' said the farmer, laying a hand on Chicksands' bridle, 'I wanted a word with you, sir. I give you fair warning, you and your Committee, you'll not turn me out without a fight! I was never given no proper notice—and there are plenty as 'll stand by me.'

The voice was thick and angry, and the hand shook. Sir Henry drew his horse away, and the man's hold dropped.

'Of course you had every notice,' said Sir Henry drily.

'I hadn't,' the man persisted. 'If the letters as they talk of were sent, I never saw 'em. And when the Committee came I was out—on business. Can't a man be out on his lawful business, Sir Henry, instead of dancin' attendance on men as know no better than he? The way this Government is doing things—you might as well live under the Czar of Russia as in this country. It's no country this for free men now, Sir Henry.'

'The Czar of Russia has come to grief, my man, for the same reason that you have,' said Sir Henry, gathering up the reins, 'for shirking his duty. All very well before the war, but now we can't afford this kind of thing.'

'And so you've told the Squire to turn me out?' said the man fiercely, his hands on his sides.

'You've had no notice from Mr. Mannering yet?'

'Not a word.'

'But you've heard from the Inspection Committee?'

The man nodded.

'But it's not they as can turn me out, if the Squire don't agree.'

There was a note of surly defiance in his voice.

'I don't know about that,' said Sir Henry, whose horse was getting restive. 'My advice to you, Gregson, is to take it quietly, pull yourself together, and get some other work. There's plenty going nowadays.'

'Thank you for nothing, Sir Henry. I've got plenty to advise me—people as I set more store by. I've got a wife and children, sir, and I shan't give in without a fuss—you may be sure of that. Good-day to you.'

Sir Henry nodded to him and rode off.

'He'll go, of course,' reflected the rider. 'Our powers are quite enough. But if I can't get Mannering to send the notice, it'll be a deal more trouble. Hullo, here's some one else! This is another pair of boots!'

He had scarcely turned the corner beyond the farm when another man came running down the sloping field, calling to him. Sir Henry pulled up his horse again. But his aspect had changed, and his voice took another note.

'Did you want to speak to me, Adam? A nice day, isn't it?'

'I saw you, Sir Henry, from the top of the field, talking to Gregson in the road, and I thought perhaps you'd let me have a few words with you. You know, sir, this is awfully hard lines.'

Sir Henry looked impatient, but the man who had spoken to him was a fine specimen of young manhood—broad-shouldered, clear-eyed, with a natural dignity of manner, not at all a person to be brushed aside.

'I'm sure you can't defend Gregson, Adam,' said Sir Henry, 'you—one of the best farmers in the district! I wish they had put you on the Inspection Committee.'

'Well, they didn't,' said the other, perhaps with a slight emphasis. 'And there's many of us feel, I can assure you, as I do. Gregson's a poor creature, but he hasn't had quite fair play, Sir Henry—that's what we feel. And he's been fifteen years on his place.' The man spoke hesitatingly, but strongly. There was a queer, suppressed hostility in his pleasant blue eyes.

'Fifteen years too long,' interrupted Sir Henry. 'I tell you, Adam, we can't afford now to let men like Gregson spoil good land while the country's likely to go hungry! The old happy-go-lucky days are done with. I wonder whether even you recognize that we're fighting for our lives?'

'I know we are, Sir Henry. But if the war makes slaves of us what good will it do if we do win it?'

Sir Henry laughed. 'Well, Adam, you were always a Radical and I was always a Conservative. And I don't like being managed any more than you do. But look at the way I'm managed in my business!—harried up and down by a parcel of young fellows from the Ministry that often seem to me fools! But we've all got to come in. And this country's worth it!'

'You know I'm with you there, sir. But why don't you get at the Squire himself? What good have he or his agent ever been to anybody? You're a landlord worth living under; but—'

'Ah! don't be in too great a hurry, Adam, and you'll see what you will see!' And with a pleasant salute, his handsome face twitching between frowns and smiles, Sir Henry rode on. 'What trade unionists we all are—high and low! That man's as good a farmer as Gregson's a vile one. But he stands by his like, as I stand by mine.'

Then his thoughts took a different turn. He was entering a park, evidently of wide extent, and finely wooded. The road through it had long fallen out of repair, and was largely grass-grown. A few sheep were pasturing on it, and a few estate cottages showed here and there. Sir Henry looked about him with quick eyes. He understood that the Inspection Sub-Committee, constituted under the Corn Production Act, and on the look-out for grass-land to put under the plough, had recommended the ploughing up of all this further end of Mannering Park. It carried very few sheep under its present management; and the herd of Jersey cattle that used to graze it had long since died out. As for the game, it had almost gone—before the war. No use, either for business or play!

Then—on this early autumn day of 1917—Sir Henry fell to musing on the vast changes coming over England in consequence of the war. 'Who would ever have believed that we—we should put ourselves to school as we have done? Military service, rations, food-prices, all our businesses "controlled," and now our land looked after! How much of it has come to stay? Well, it won't affect me much! Ah! is that the Rector?'

For a hundred yards ahead of him he perceived a clerical figure, spare and tall, in a wideawake hat, swinging towards him. The September sun was westering, and behind the approaching man lay broad stretches of wood, just showing here and there the first bronze and purple signs of autumn.

The Rector, recognizing the solitary rider, waved his hand in welcome, and Sir Henry pulled up. The two men, who were evidently personal friends, exchanged greetings.

'You're going to the Hall, Sir Henry?' said the Rector.

Sir Henry described his business.

The Rector shook his head reflectively.

'You haven't announced yourself, I hope?'

'No, I took that simple precaution. I suppose he's already pretty savage?'

'With whom? The Committee? Yes, you won't find him easy to deal with. But just at present there's a distraction. His new secretary arrived some weeks ago, and he now spends his whole time, from morning till night, dictating to her and showing her his things.'

'Secretary? A woman? Good heavens! Who is she?'

'A great swell, I understand. Oxford First Class in Mods, Second in Greats. I've only just seen her. A striking-looking person.'

'Why isn't she in France, or doing munition work?' growled Sir Henry.

'I don't know. I suppose she has her reasons. She seems patriotic enough. But I've only exchanged a few words with her, at a very hurried luncheon, at which, by the way, there was a great deal too much to eat. She and Pamela disappeared directly afterwards.'

'Oh, so Pamela's at home? What's the name of the new woman? I suppose she's to chaperon Pamela?'

'I shouldn't wonder. Her name is Miss Bremerton.'

'Beryl declares that Pamela is going to be a beauty—and clever besides. She used to be a jolly child. But then they go to school and grow up quite different. I've hardly seen her for a year and a half.'

'Well, you'll judge for yourself. Good luck to you! I don't envy you your job.'

'Good Lord, no! But you see I'm Chairman of this blessed show, and they all fixed on me to bell the cat. We want a hundred acres of the Park, a new agent, notices for three farmers, etcetera!'

The Rector whistled. 'I shall wait, on tiptoe, to see what happens! What are your powers?'

'Oh, tremendous!'

'So you have him? Well, good-day.'

And the Rector was passing on. But Sir Henry stooped over his horse's neck—'As you know, perhaps, it would be very inconvenient to my poor little Beryl if Mannering were to make a quarrel of it with me.'

'Ah, I gathered that she and Aubrey were engaged,' said the Rector cordially. 'Best congratulations! Has the Squire behaved well?'

'Moderately. He declares he has no money to give them.'

'And yet he spent eighteen hundred pounds last week at that Christie sale!' said the Rector with a laugh. 'And now I suppose the new secretary will add fuel to the flame. I saw Pamela for a minute alone, and she said Miss Bremerton was "just as much gone on Greek things as father," and they were like a pair of lunatics when the new vases came down.'

'Oh, blow the secretary!' said Sir Henry with exasperation. 'And meanwhile his daughters can't get a penny out of him for any war purpose whatever! Well, I must go on.'

They parted, and Sir Henry put his cob into a sharp trot which soon brought him in sight of a distant building—low and irregular—surrounded by trees, and by the wide undulating slopes of the park.

'Dreadfully ugly place,' he said to himself, as the house grew plainer; 'rebuilt at the worst time, by a man with no more taste than a broomstick. Still, he was the sixteenth owner, from father to son. That's something.'

And he fell to thinking, with that half-ironic depreciation which he allowed to himself, and would have stood from no one else, of his own brand-new Georgian house, built from the plans of a famous American architect, ten years before the war, out of the profits of an abnormally successful year, and furnished in what he believed to be faultless taste by the best professional decorator he could find.

'Yet compared to a Mannering, what do I mean to the people here? You scarcely begin to take root in this blessed country under half a century. Mannering is exceedingly unpopular; the people think him a selfish idler; but if he chose he could whistle them back with a hundredth part of the trouble it would take me! And if Aubrey wanted to go into Parliament, he'd probably have his pick of the county divisions. Curious fellow, Aubrey! I wonder exactly what Beryl sees in him?'

His daughter's prospects were not indeed very clear to a mind that liked everything cut and dried. Aubrey Mannering was the Squire's eldest son; but the Squire was not rich, and had been for years past wasting his money on Greek antiquities, which seemed to his neighbours, including Sir Henry Chicksands, a very dubious investment. If Aubrey should want to sell, who was going to buy such things at high prices after the war? No doubt prices at Christie's—for good stuff—had been keeping up very well. That was because of war profits. People were throwing money about now. But when the war industries came to an end? and the national bills had to be paid?

'The only thing that can't go down is land,' thought Sir Henry, with the cheerful consciousness of a man who had steadily year by year increased what had originally been a very modest property to something like a large estate.

Mannering had plenty of that commodity. But how far had he dipped the estate? It must be heavily mortgaged. By decent management anybody, no doubt, might still bring it round. 'But Aubrey's not the man. And since he joined up at the beginning of the war the Squire won't let him have a voice in anything. And now Desmond—by George, the twins are nineteen this month!—Desmond'll be off directly. And then his father will be madder than ever.'

By this time the ugly house was near at hand, and the thick woods which surrounded it had closed about the horse and rider.

'Splendid timber,' thought Sir Henry, as he rode through it, measuring it with a commercial eye, 'but all past its prime, and abominably neglected.... Hullo! that looks like Pamela, and the new woman—the secretary!'

For two ladies were coming down the drive towards him, with a big white and tan collie jumping round them. One of them, very tall and erect, was dressed in a dark coat and skirt, reasonably short, a small black toque, and brown boots and leggings. The close-fitting coat showed a shapely but quite substantial figure. She carried a stick, and walked with a peculiarly rapid and certain step. The young girl beside her seemed by comparison a child. She wore a white dress, in keeping with the warm September day, and with it a dark blue sports coat, and a shady hat. Her dress only just passed her knees, and beneath it the slender legs and high heels drew Sir Henry's disapproving eye. He hated extravagance in anything. Beryl managed to look fashionable, without looking outré, as Pamela did. But he reined up to greet her with ready smiles.

'Well, Pamela, jolly to see you at home again! My word, you've grown! Shall I find your father in?'

'Yes, we left him in the library. May I introduce Miss Bremerton—Sir Henry Chicksands.' The girl spoke with hurried shyness, the quick colour in her cheeks. The lady beside her bowed, and Sir Henry took off his hat. Each surveyed the other. 'A strong-minded female!' thought Sir Henry, who was by no means advanced in his views of the other sex.

'The strong-minded female,' however, was not, it seemed, of the talkative kind. She remained quite silent while Pamela and Sir Henry exchanged some family gossip, with her ungloved hand caressing the nose of the collie, who was pressing against her with intrusive friendliness. But her easy self-possession as contrasted with Pamela's nervousness was all the time making an impression on Sir Henry, as was also the fact of her general good looks. Not a beauty—not at all; but, as the Rector had said, 'striking.'

As for Pamela, what was the matter with the child? Until Beryl's name was mentioned, there was not a smile to be got out of her. And it was a very fleeting one when it came. Desmond's name fared a little better. At that the girl did at last raise her beautiful eyes, which till then she had hardly allowed to be seen, and there was a ray in them.

'He's here on leave,' she said; 'a few days. He's just got his Commission and been accepted for the artillery. He goes into camp next week. He thinks he'll be out by January.'

'We must certainly manage to see him before he goes,' said Sir Henry heartily. Then turning to Miss Bremerton with the slightly over-emphatic civility of a man who prides himself on his manners in all contingencies, he asked her if she was already acquainted with the Mannering neighbourhood.

Miss Bremerton replied that it was quite unknown to her. 'You'll admire our trees,' said Sir Henry. 'They're very fine.'

'Are they?' said the lady rather absently, giving a perfunctory glance to the woods sloping away on her right towards a little stream winding in the hollow. Sir Henry felt a slight annoyance. He was a good fellow, and no more touchy as to personal dignity than the majority of men of his age and class. But he was accustomed to be treated with a certain deference, and in Miss Bremerton's manner there was none whatever.

'Well, good-bye, Pamela. I mustn't miss your father. When are you coming over to see Beryl?'

'How am I to get there?' said the girl with a sudden laugh.

'Oh, I see, you've got no petrol allowance?'

'How should we? Nobody's doing any war work here.'

There was an odd note in the speaker's voice.

'Why don't you join Beryl in her canteen work?' said Sir Henry abruptly.

'I don't know.'

'She wants help badly. She passes your gate on her way to Fallerton. She could pick you up, and bring you back.'

'Yes,' said Pamela. There was a pause.

'Well, good-bye, dear,' said Sir Henry again, and with a ceremonious bow to Pamela's companion, he rode on—meditating on many things.

'The Squire's in, Sir Henry, but—well, he's very busy.'

'Never mind, Forest. I must see him. Can you find some one to take my horse round?'

The grey-haired butler looked perplexed.

'I've only got my own small boy, Sir Henry. There's two more of our men gone this morning. I don't know if you'll trust him. He's a good boy.'

'Send him along, Forest. My beast's a lamb—you know him. But look here, Forest'—Sir Henry dismounted, bridle in hand. 'Don't give the Squire notice that I'm here, if you can help it, till you announce me.'

The butler, who, in spite of his grey hair, was a square-set, vigorous-looking fellow, might be said, in reply, to have given the Squire's visitor a wink. At any rate a look of understanding passed between the two. The butler went quickly back into the house, and re-emerged with a boy, who was the small image of his father, to whom Sir Henry cheerfully gave up his cob. But as Forest led the way through the outer hall he stopped to say:

'The Squire's not alone, sir. There was a gentleman arrived just as Miss Pamela went out. But I don't think he'll stay long.'

'Who is he?'

'Can't say, sir. He's lodging in the village, and comes to see the Squire's collections sometimes.'

They were now in a long passage running along the eastern front of the house to a large room which had been added to its southern end, in order to hold the Squire's library and collections. Midway the butler turned.

'You've heard, Sir Henry, about Mr. Desmond?'

'Yes, Miss Pamela told me.'

'Mr. Desmond says he'll be in France by January. He's as pleased as possible, but it's a deal sooner than Mr. Mannering hoped.'

'Well, we've all got to take our chance in this war,' said Sir Henry gravely. 'And the artillery is a bit safer than the infantry. You know my son Arthur's a gunner.'

'I hope he's all right, sir?'

'Well, he's still on light work. He comes home this week for a bit. He was gassed at Ypres a year and a half ago, and had a bullet taken out of his chest about two months since. But he is nearly fit again.'

The butler expressed his sympathy with a complete absence of shyness or servility, then threw open a door at the end of the passage, announcing, 'Sir Henry Chicksands, sir.'

'D-mn!' said a voice loudly within.

Sir Henry gave an involuntary start. Another look passed between him and Forest, amused or interrogative on the visitor's part, non-committal on the butler's.

The library of Mannering Hall as Sir Henry Chicksands entered it presented a curious spectacle. It was a long, barn-like room, partly lined with books, and partly with glass cases, in which Greek vases, Tanagra figures, and other Greek and Etruscan antiquities, all carefully marked and labelled, were displayed. A few large tables stood at intervals on the shabby carpet, also laden with books and specimens. They conveyed an impression of dust and disorder, as though no housemaid had been allowed to touch them for weeks—with one exception. A table, smaller than the rest, but arranged with scrupulous neatness, stood at one side of the room, with a typewriter upon it, certain books, and a rack for stationery. A folded duster lay at one corner. Pens, pencils, a box of clips, and a gum-pot stood where a careful hand had placed them. And at a corner corresponding to the duster was a small vase of flowers—autumnal roses—the only flowers in the room.

But the various untidy accumulations, most of which seemed to be of old standing, had been evidently just added to by some recent arrivals. Four large packing-cases, newly opened, took up much of what free space was left on the floor. The straw, paper, and cottonwool, in which their contents had been packed, had been tossed out with a careless or impatient hand, and littered the carpet. Among the litter stood here and there some Greek vases of different sizes; in particular, a superb pair, covered with figures; beside which stood the owner of Mannering, talking to an apparently young man with an eye-glass, who was sitting on the floor closely examining the vases. The Squire turned a furrowed brow towards his approaching visitor, and putting down a small bronze he had been holding raised a warning hand.

'How do you do, Chicksands? Very sorry, but I'm much too filthy to touch. And I'm horribly busy! These things arrived last night, and Mr. Levasseur has kindly come over to help me unpack them. Don't know if you've met him. Mr. Levasseur—Sir Henry Chicksands.'

The man on the floor looked up carelessly, just acknowledging Sir Henry's slight inclination. Sir Henry's inner mind decided against him—at once—instinctively. What was a stout fellow, who at any rate looked as though he were still of military age, doing with nonsense of this sort, at four o'clock in the day, when England wanted every able-bodied man she possessed, either to fight for her or to work for her? At the same time the reflection passed rapidly through his mind that neither the man nor the name had come up—so far as he could remember—before the County Tribunal of which he was Chairman.

'Well, Chicksands, what do you want with me?' said the Squire abruptly. 'Will you take a chair?' And he pointed to one from which he hastily removed a coat.

'I have some confidential business to talk to you about,' said Sir Henry, with a look at the dusty gentleman among the straw.

'Something you want me to do that I'll be bound I shan't want to do! Is that it?' said Mannering with vivacity.

He stood with his hands on a table behind him, his long spare frame in a nervous fidget, his eyes bright and hostile, and a spot of red on either thin cheek. Beside Chicksands, who was of middle height, solidly built, and moderately stout, with mental and physical competence written all over him, the Squire of Mannering seemed but the snippet of a man. He was singularly thin, with a slender neck, and a small head covered with thick hair, prematurely white, which tumbled over his forehead and eyes. He had the complexion of a girl, disproportionately large nose, very sharply and delicately cut as to bridge and nostril, and a mouth and chin which seemed to be in perpetual movement. He looked older than Sir Henry, who was verging on sixty, but he was in fact just over fifty.

Sir Henry smiled a little at the tone of the Squire's question, but he answered good-humouredly.

'I believe, when we've talked it over, you won't think it unreasonable. But I've come to explain.'

'I know, you want me to give Gregson notice. But I warn you I'm not the least inclined to do anything of the kind.' And the speaker crossed his arms, which were very long and thin, over a narrow chest, while his eyes restlessly countered those of Sir Henry.

Chicksands paused a moment before replying.

'I have a good many papers here to show you,' he said at last, mildly, drawing a large envelope half-way from the inner pocket of his coat to illustrate his words, and then putting it back again. 'But I really can't discuss them except with yourself.'

The Squire's eyes shot battle.

'It's the war, of course,' he said with emphasis; 'it's all the war. I'm told to do things I don't want to do, which affect my personal freedom, and other people's, because of a war I don't believe in, never asked for, and don't approve of. Here's Levasseur now, a clever fellow, cleverer than either you or me, Chicksands, and he's no more patriotic than I am. You talk to him!'

'Thank you, I'm too busy,' said Sir Henry sharply, his face stiffening. 'Where can you see me, Mannering? I'm rather pressed for time. Is the smoking-room free?' And with a marked avoidance of any concern with the gentleman on the floor, who had by now risen to his feet, Sir Henry made an impatient movement towards a door at the further end of the library which stood ajar.

Levasseur looked amused. He was a strongly-built, smooth-shaven fellow, with rather long hair, and the sallow look of the cigarette-smoker. His eyes were sleepy, his expression indolent or good-natured.

'Oh, I'll make myself scarce with the greatest pleasure,' he said civilly. 'I can stroll about the park till you're ready for me again,' he added, turning to the Squire. 'Lovely day—I'll take a book and some cigarettes.' And diving into an open box which stood near he filled his cigarette-case from it, and then looked round him for a book. 'Where's that copy of the Anthology? That'll do nicely.'

The Squire burst into a laugh, observing Sir Henry.

'He's over military age, Chicksands.'

'I suppose so,' said Sir Henry stiffly.

'But only by six months, when the Act passed. So he's just escaped you.'

'I've really no concern whatever with Mr. Levasseur's affairs.' Sir Henry had flushed angrily. 'Is it to be here, or the smoking-room?'

'Ta-ta! See you again presently,' said Levasseur. 'Ah, there's the book!' And diving to the floor for a hat and a book lying beside it, he made off, lighting a cigarette, with a laughing backward glance towards the Squire and his companion.

'Well, now, what is it?' said Mannering, throwing himself with an air of resignation into a low arm-chair, and taking out a pipe. 'Won't you smoke, Chicksands?'

'Thank you, I've had my morning's allowance. Hullo! Who did that? What an awfully fine thing!'

For suddenly, behind the Squire's head, Chicksands had become aware of an easel, and on it a charcoal sketch, life-size, of a boy, who seemed about eighteen or nineteen, in cricketing dress.

The Squire looked round.

'What, that sketch of Desmond? Haven't you seen it? Yes, it's jolly good. I got Orpen to do it in July.'

Now that Sir Henry had once perceived the drawing it seemed to him to light up the whole place. The dress was the dress of the Eton Eleven; there was just a suggestion of pale blue in the sash round the waist. But the whole impression was Greek in its manly freedom and beauty; above all in its sacrifice of all useless detail to one broad and simple effect. Youth, eager, strong, self-confident, with its innocent parted lips, and its steadfast eyes looking out over the future—the drawing stood there as the quintessence, the embodiment, of a whole generation. So might the young Odysseus have looked when he left his mother on his first journey to hunt the boar with his kinsfolk on Mount Parnassus. And with such an air had hundreds of thousands of English boys gone out on a deadlier venture since the great war began, with a like intensity of will, a like merry scorn of fate.

Sir Henry was conscious of a lump in his throat. He had lost his youngest son in the retreat from Mons, and two nephews on the Somme.

'It's wonderful,' he said, not very clearly. 'I envy you such a possession.'

The Squire made no reply. He sat with his long body hunched up in the deep chair, a pair of brooding eyes fixed on his visitor.

'Well, what is it?' he said again, in a voice that was barely civil.

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CHAPTER II

Sir Henry had been talking some time. The Squire had not interrupted him much, but the papers which Sir Henry had presented to him from time to time—Government communications, Committee reports, and the like—were mostly lying on the floor, where, after a perfunctory glance at them, he had very quickly dropped them.

'Well, that's our case,' said Sir Henry at last, thrusting his hands into his pockets and leaning back in his chair, 'and I assure you we've taken a great deal of trouble about it. We shouldn't ask you or anybody else to do these things if it wasn't vitally necessary for the food-supply of the country. But we're going to have a narrow squeak for it next spring and summer, and we must get more food out of the land.'

Whereupon, in a manner rather provokingly reminiscent of a public meeting, Sir Henry fell into a discourse on submarines, tonnage, the food needs of our Allies, and the absolute necessity for undoing and repairing the havoc of Cobdenism—matters of which the newspapers of the day were commonly full. That the sound of his own voice was agreeable to him might have been suspected.

Mr. Mannering roughly broke in upon him.

'What was that you said about ploughing up the park?'

'We ask you to break up fifty acres of it near the Fallerton end, and perhaps some other bits elsewhere. This first bit is so far from the house you'll never notice it; and the land ought to do very well if it's properly broken and trampled down.'

The Squire sat up and began to tick things off on the fingers of his left hand.

'Let me understand. You want me to give three of my farmers notice to quit—Gregson first of all—for bad farming; you ask me to plough up fifty acres of my park; and you have the goodness to suggest that I should cut some of my woods.'

Sir Henry realized that possibly a strain on his temper was coming, but he felt sure he could stand it.

'That is what we suggest—for your own advantage and the country's.'

'And pray who are "we"? I don't yet understand that clearly.'

'"We,"' said Sir Henry patiently, 'are the County War Agricultural Committee, formed for the express purpose of getting more food out of the land, and so making these islands self-supporting.'

'And if I refuse, what can you do?'

'Well, I'm afraid,' said Sir Henry, smiling uncomfortably, 'we can act without you.'

'You can turn out my farmers, and plough my land, as you please?'

'Our powers are very wide.'

'Under—what do you call the beastly thing?—"Dora"—the Defence of the Realm Act?'

Sir Henry nodded.

The Squire rose and began to pace up and down, his hands under his coat-tails, his long spider legs and small feet picking their way in and out of the piles and boxes on the floor. At last he turned impetuously.

'Look here, Chicksands, I shall not give that man warning!'

Sir Henry surveyed the lanky figure standing opposite to him.

'I should be very sorry, Mannering, to see you take that course,' he said, smiling and amiable as before. 'In some ways, of course, I am no more in love with some of the Government's proceedings than you are. We landlords may have to defend ourselves. I want, if I may say so, to keep your influence intact for the things that really matter. You and I, and all the other Brookshire landlords, may have, at some point, to act together. But we shall resist unreasonable demands much more easily if we accept the reasonable ones.'

The Squire shook his head. The suave tone of the speaker had clearly begun to rasp his nerves.

'No! You and I have really nothing in common. You may take it from me that I shall not give these men notice. What happens then?'

'The Government steps in,' said Sir Henry quietly.

'And turns them out? Very well, let them. And the park?'

'We are, of course, most anxious to consult you.'

'Excuse me, that's nonsense! I refuse—that's flat.'

Sir Henry shrugged his shoulders. His tone became a trifle colder.

'I can't believe that you will refuse. You can't deny—no sensible man could—that we've simply got to grow more food at home. The submarines have settled that for us.'

'Who brought the submarines upon us? The politicians! No politicians, no war! If it hadn't been for a pack of idiots called diplomats making mischief abroad, and a pack of incompetents called politicians unable to keep their heads at home, there'd have been no war. It's Russia's war—France's war! Who asked the country whether it wanted a war? Who asked me?' The Squire, standing opposite to Sir Henry, tapped his chest vehemently.

'The country is behind the war,' said Chicksands firmly.

'How do we know? How do you know? I've as much right to an opinion as you, and I tell you the country is sick and tired of the war. We are all dying of the war! We shall all be paupers because of the war! What is France to me, or Belgium? We shall have lost men, money, security—half the things that make life worth living—for what?'

'Honour!' said Sir Henry sharply, as he got on his feet.

'Honour!' sneered Mannering—'what's honour? It means one thing to me and another to you. Aubrey bangs me over the head with it. But I'm like the Doctor in the Punch and Judy show—he thinks he's knocked me flat. He hasn't. I've a new argument every time he comes. And as for my daughters, they think me a lunatic—a stingy lunatic besides—because I won't give to their Red Cross shows and bazaars. I've nothing to give. The income tax gentlemen have taken care of that.'

'Yet you spend on this kind of thing!' Sir Henry pointed to the vases. He had grown a little white.

'Of course I can. That's permanent. That's something to mend the holes that the soldiers and the politicians are making. When the war's become a nightmare that nobody wants to remember, those little things'—he pointed to a group of Greek bronzes and terra-cottas on a table near—'will still be the treasures of the world!'

In the yeasty deep of Sir Henry's honest mind emotions were rising which he knew now he should not long be able to control. He took up his hat and stick.

'I'm sorry, Mannering, that I have not been able to convince you. I'm sorry for your point of view—and I'm sorry for your sons.'

The words slipped out of his mouth before he knew.

The Squire bounded.

'My sons! The one's a fire-eater, with whom you can't argue. The other's a child—a babe—whom the Government proposes to murder before he has begun to live.'

Sir Henry looked at the speaker, who had been violently flushed a minute earlier, and was now as pale as himself, and then at the sketch of Desmond, just behind the Squire. His eyes dropped; the hurry in his blood subsided.

'Well, good-bye, Mannering. I'll—I'll do what I can to make things easy for you.'

The Squire laughed angrily.

'You'll put on the screws politely? Thank you? But still it will be you who'll be putting the screw on, who'll be turning out my farmers, and ploughing up my land, and cutting down my trees. Doesn't it strike you that—well, that—under the circumstances—it will be rather difficult for Aubrey and Beryl to keep up their engagement?'

The Squire was sitting on the edge of the table, his thin legs crossed, his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets. Sir Henry coloured hotly.

'You gave your consent to their engagement, Mannering.'

'Yes, but I propose to withdraw it,' said the Squire coolly.

Sir Henry's indignation kept him cool also.

'You can't play ducks and drakes with young people's lives like that. Even you can't do that.'

'I can. I can withdraw my consent.'

'Because you mean to fight the County War Committee, of which I am Chairman?'

'Precisely. The situation is too difficult,' said the Squire with sparkling eyes. 'The young people will no doubt see it for themselves.'

'Pshaw! Nonsense!' cried Sir Henry, finally losing his temper. 'Aubrey is long since of age and his own master.'

'Perhaps, but he is an extravagant fellow, who likes money and spends it. And if he is his own master, I am the master of the estate; there is no entail.'

Chicksands laughed aloud.

'So because I come on a mission to try and save you friction and trouble, you are going to avenge yourself on your son and my daughter?'

'I merely point out the properties,' said the Squire provokingly, his legs dangling.

There was a pause. Sir Henry broke it with dignity, as he turned away.

'I think we had better break off this discussion. I cannot—I do not—believe you will carry out what you say. But if you do, I shall stand by the young people.'

'No doubt!' said the Squire, who seemed to bristle from head to foot. 'Well, good-bye, Sir Henry. Sorry your visit has not been more agreeable. Forest will look after you.' And ringing the bell vehemently as he passed the fireplace, the Squire walked rapidly to the door and threw it open.

Chicksands passed through it, speechless with indignation and, if the truth were told, bewilderment.

The Squire shut the door upon his adversary, and then, with his hands on his sides, exploded in a fit of laughter.

'I always knew I must be rude to the old boy some time,' he said, with the glee of a mischievous child. 'But, ye gods, how his feathers drooped! He looked like a plucked cockatoo as he went out.'

He stood thinking a moment, and then with a look of sudden determination he went to his writing-table and sat down to it. Drawing a writing-pad towards him, he wrote as follows:

'MY DEAR AUBREY—Your future father-in-law has just been insulting and harrying me in ways which no civilized State had ever heard of before the war. He is the Chairman of a ridiculous body that calls itself the County War Agricultural Committee, that lays absurd eggs in the shape of sub-Committees to vex landlords. They have been going about among my farmers and want me to turn out three of them. I decline, so I suppose they'll do it for me. And they're going to plough up a lot of the park—without my leave. And Chicksands is the head and front of the whole business. He came here to-day to try and coax me into submission. But I would neither be coaxed nor bullied. I've broken with him; and if my children stand by me properly, they'll break with him too. I really don't see how you're going to marry Beryl after this. At least, I shall certainly not help you to do it, and if you defy me you must take the consequences. The whole world's gone mad. My only consolation is that I have just got some new Greek things, and that Levasseur's helping me unpack them. However, it's no good talking to you about them. You wasted all your time at Cambridge, and I doubt whether you could construe a bit of Euripides to save your life.

'Of course if you want to talk this over, you had better run down. I have got a new secretary—came here six weeks ago—a topping young woman—who reads Greek like a bird. But her quantities are not always what they should be. Good-bye.—Your affectionate father,

'EDMUND MANNERING.'

Having finished the epistle he read it over with a complacent countenance, put it up and stamped it. Then he looked at his watch.

'What a long time that young woman's been away! I told her to take two hours off, but of course I didn't mean it. That was just my excessive politeness. D-mn my politeness. It's always getting in my way. I forget that women are naturally lazy. I daresay she was a bit fagged. But if she's interested in her work, what does that matter? I wonder whether she's looked out all these references?'

And walking over to the one neat table In the room he surveyed it. There were some sheets lying on it mostly covered with an excellent Greek script, which he turned over. Suddenly he swooped on one of them.

'Hullo! That line's wrong. Won't scan. Trusted to her memory, I suppose. Didn't look it up. And yesterday I caught her out in her accents. Women play the devil with accents. But she writes a pretty Greek. Eh? What?' For he had become aware of the re-entry of Levasseur, who was standing at his elbow.

''Fraid I can't stay now,' said that person. 'I've promised to pick up some wounded at the station to-night.'

'You—wounded!—what do you mean?' said the Squire, turning upon him.

Levasseur's large, thin-lipped mouth showed what seemed an habitual grin.

'I'd been getting so unpopular, it was becoming a nuisance. Line of least resistance, you understand. Now everybody's quite civil again. And I like chauffing.'

'A mere bit of weakness!' grumbled the Squire. 'Either you keep out of the war, or you go into it. You'd better go off to a camp now, and get trained—and shot—as quickly as possible—get done with it.'

'Oh no,' laughed the other. 'I'm all for middle courses. If they'll let me go on with my book, I don't mind driving a few poor fellows now and then!'

The Squire looked at him critically.

'The fact is you're too well fed, Levasseur, or you look it. That annoys people. Now I might gorge for a month, and shouldn't put on a pound.'

'I suppose your household is rationed?'

'Not it! We eat what we want. Just like the labourers. I found an old labourer eating his dinner under a hedge yesterday. Half a pound of bread at the very least, and he gets as much for his supper, and nearly as much for his breakfast. "I shall eat it, Squire, as long as I can get it. There's nowt else packs ye like bread." And quite right too. Good word "pack."'

'What'll he do when he can't get it?' laughed Levasseur, taking up his hat.

'Stuff! This food business is all one big blague. Anyway the Government got us into the war; they're jolly well bound to feed us through it. They will, for their own necks' sake. Well, good-night.'

Levasseur nodded in response, with the same silent, aimless grin, and disappeared through the garden door of the library.

'Queer fellow!' thought the Squire. 'But he's useful. I shall get him to help catalogue these things as he did the others. Ah, there you are!'

He turned with a reproachful air as the door opened.

The westerly sun was coming strongly into the library, and shone full on the face and figure of the Squire's new secretary as she stood in the door-way. He expected an apology for an absence just five minutes over the two hours; but she offered none.

'Pamela asked me to tell you, Mr. Mannering, that tea was ready under the verandah.'

'Afternoon tea is an abominable waste of time!' said the Squire discontentedly, facing her with a Greek pot under each arm.

'Do you think so? To me it's always the pleasantest meal in the day.'

The voice was musical and attractive, but its complete self-possession produced a vague irritation in the Squire. With his two former secretaries, a Cambridge man and a spectacled maiden with a London University degree, he had been accustomed to play the tyrant as must as he pleased. Something had told him from the very beginning that he would not be able to tyrannize over this newcomer.

But his quick masterful temper was already trying to devise ways of putting her down. He beckoned her towards the table where she had left her work, and she went obediently.

'You've got that line wrong.' He pointed to a quotation from the Odyssey. 'Read it, please!'

She read it. He stopped her triumphantly.

'No, no, you can't make that long!' He pointed to one of the Greek words.

Her fair skin flushed.

'But indeed you can!' she said eagerly. 'Merry quotes three parallel passages. I have them in one of my notebooks.' And she began to search her table. Mannering stopped her ungraciously.

'Of course there's always some learned fool behind every bad reading. Anyway, what do you say to those accents?' He pointed severely to another line of her Greek. This time Miss Bremerton's countenance changed.

'Oh dear, what a blunder!' she said in distress, as she bent over her pages. 'I assure you I don't often do anything as bad as that.'

Mannering was secretly delighted. His manner became at once all politeness.

'Don't worry yourself, please. We all make mistakes.... You have a beautiful Greek handwriting.'

Miss Bremerton took the compliment calmly—did not indeed seem to hear it. She was already scratching out the offending words with a sharp penknife, and daintily rewriting them. Then she looked up.

'Pamela asked me to go back to her. And I was to say, will you come, or shall she send tea here?'

'Oh, I'll come, I'll come. I've got something to say to Pamela,' said the Squire, frowning. And he stalked in front of her along the library passage, his brilliant white hair gleaming in its shadows. It was well perhaps that he did not see the amusement which played round Elizabeth Bremerton's handsome mouth as she pursued him.

Tea was laid on a flagged walk under a glazed pergola running along part of the southern wall of the house. Here Pamela was sitting waiting, with a basket of knitting on her knee which she put out of sight as soon as she heard her father's step. She had taken off her hat, and her plentiful brown hair was drawn in a soft wave across her forehead, and thickly coiled behind a shapely head. She was very young, and very pretty. Perhaps the impression of youth predominated, youth uncertain of itself, conscious rather of its own richness and force than of any definite aims or desires. Her expression was extremely reserved. A veil seemed to lie over her deep, heavy-lidded eyes, and over features that had now delicacy and bloom, but promised much more—something far beyond any mere girlish prettiness. She was tall and finely made, and for the school tableaux in which she had frequently helped she had been generally cast for such parts as 'Nausicaa among her maidens,' 'Athene lighting the way for Odysseus and Telemachus,' 'Dante's Beatrice,' or any other personage requiring dignity, even a touch of majesty. Flowing skirts, indeed, at once made a queen of her. It was evident that she was not at her ease with her father; nor, as yet, with her father's new secretary.

The contrast between this lady and Pamela Mannering was obvious at once. If Pamela suggested romance, Elizabeth Bremerton suggested efficiency, cheerfulness, and the practical life. Her grandmother had been Dutch, and in Elizabeth the fair skin and yellow-gold hair (Rembrandt's 'Saskia' shows the type) of many Dutch forebears had reappeared. She was a trifle plump; her hair curled prettily round her temples; her firm dimpled chin and the fair complexion of her face and neck were set off, evidently with intention, by the plain blouse of black silky stuff, open at the neck, and showing a modest string of small but real pearls. The Squire, who had a wide knowledge of jewels, had noticed these pearls at once. It seemed to him—vaguely—that lady secretaries should not possess real pearls; or if they did possess them, should carefully keep them to themselves.

He accepted a cup of tea from his daughter, and drank it absently before he asked:

'Where's Desmond?'

'He went to lunch at Fallerton—at the camp. Captain Byles asked him. I think afterwards he was going to play in a match.'

The same thought passed through the minds of both father and daughter. 'This day week, Desmond will be gone.' In Pamela it brought back the dull pain of which she was now habitually conscious—the pain of expected parting. In her father it aroused an equally habitual antagonism—the temper, indeed, of ironic exasperation in which all his thinking and doing were at the moment steeped. He looked up suddenly.

'Pamela, I have got something disagreeable to say to you.'

His daughter turned a startled face.

'I have had a quarrel with Sir Henry Chicksands, and I do not wish you, or Desmond, or any of my children, to have any communication henceforth with him, or with any of his family!'

'Father, what do you mean?'

The girl's incredulous dismay only increased the Squire's irritation.

'I mean what I say. Of course your married sisters and Aubrey will do what they please, though I have warned Aubrey how I shall view it if he takes sides against me. But you and Desmond are under my control—you, at any rate. I forbid you to go to Chetworth, and your friendship with Beryl must be given up.'

'Father!' cried his daughter passionately, 'she is my best friend, and she is engaged to Aubrey.'

'If they are wise, they will break it off. Family quarrels are awkward things. And if Aubrey has any feeling for his father, he will be as angry as I am.'

'What has Sir Henry been doing, father?'

'Taking my own property out of my hands, my dear, giving notice to my farmers, and proposing to plough up my park, without my consent. That's all—just a trifle. But it's a trifle I shall fight!'

The Squire struck the arm of his chair with a long and bony hand.

'Why, it's only because they must!' said the girl half scornfully, her breath fluttering. 'Think what other people put up with, father. And what they do! And we do nothing!'

Every word was said with difficulty, torn out of her by the shock of her father's statement. The Squire stared at her threateningly a little, then quieted down. He did not want a wrangle with Pamela, to whom in general he was not unkind, while keeping a strict rule over her.

'Do nothing? What should we do? As if the war did not bleed us at every turn already. I warn you all I shan't be able to pay the income tax next year. Mannering will be sold up.' And thrusting his hands again into his pockets, he looked gloomily before him, over a piece of ill-kept garden, to the sloping park and blue interlacing hills that filled the distance.

Elizabeth Bremerton put down her teacup, glanced at the father and daughter, and went discreetly away, back to the library and her work.

Pamela hesitated a little, but at last moved nearer to him, and put a hand on his arm.

'Father! I dreadfully want you to let me do something!'

'Eh, what?' said Mannering, rousing himself. 'Don't try and coax me, child. It doesn't answer.'

'I don't want to coax you,' said the girl proudly withdrawing her hand. 'It's a very simple thing. Will you let me go and do day work at the new Hospital, just across the park? They want some help in the housework. There are fifty wounded men there.'

'Certainly not,' said Mannering firmly. 'You are too young. You have your education to think of. I told you I engaged Miss Bremerton to give you two hours' classics a day. When we've arranged these pots, she'll be free. You must also keep up your music. You have no time for housemaiding. And I don't approve of housemaiding for my daughter.'

'The nicest girls I know are doing anything—scrubbing, washing up, polishing bath-taps, making swabs, covering splints,' said Pamela in a low voice. 'There are two of the Joyce girls at this hospital, just my age. Of course they don't let you do any nursing—for months.'

'Lord Entwhistle may do what he likes with his girls. I propose to do what I think best with mine,' said Mannering as he rose.

Then the girl's passion broke out.

'It's horrible, father, that you won't do anything for the war, or let me do anything. Oh, I'm glad'—she clenched her hands as she stood opposite him, her beautiful head thrown back—'I'm thankful, that you can't stop Desmond!'

Mannering looked at her, frowned, turned abruptly, and went away whistling.

Pamela was left alone in the September evening. She betook herself to an old grass-grown walk between yew hedges at the bottom of the Dutch garden, and paced it in a tumult of revolt and pain. Not to go to Chetworth again! not to see Beryl, or any of them! How cruel! how monstrously unjust!

'I shan't obey!—why should I? Beryl and I must manage to see each other—of course we shall! Girls aren't the slaves they used to be. If a thing is unjust, we can fight it—we ought to fight it!—somehow. Poor, poor Beryl! Of course Aubrey will stick to her, whatever father does. He would be a cur if he didn't. Desmond and I would never speak to him again!... Beryl'll have Arthur to help her, directly. Oh, I wish I had a brother like Arthur!' Her face softened and quivered as she stood still a moment, sending her ardent look towards the sunset. 'I think I shall ask him to advise me.... I don't suppose he will.... How provoking he used to be! but awfully kind too. He'll think I ought to do what father tells me. How can I! It's wrong—it's abominable! Everybody despises us. And Desmond's dying to be off—to get away from it all—like Aubrey. He hates it so—he almost hates coming home! It's humiliating, and it's not our fault!'

Such cries and thoughts ran through her as she walked impetuously up and down, in rebellion against her father, unhappy for her girl friend, and smarting under the coercion put upon her patriotism and her conscience. For she had only two months before left a school where the influence of a remarkable head-mistress had been directed towards awakening in a group of elder girls, to which Pamela belonged, a vivid consciousness of the perils and sufferings of the war—of the sacredness of the cause for which England was fighting, of the glory of England, and the joy and privilege of English citizenship. In these young creatures the elder woman had kindled a flame of feeling which, when they parted from her and their school life—so she told them—was to take practical effect in work for their country, given with a proud and glad devotion.

But Pamela, leaving school at the end of July for the last time, after a surfeit of examinations, had been pronounced 'tired out' by an old aunt, a certain Lady Cassiobury, who came for long periodical visits to Mannering, and made a show of looking after her motherless niece. Accordingly she had been packed off to Scotland for August to stay with a school friend, one of a large family in a large country house in the Highlands. And there, roaming amid lochs and heather, with a band of young people, the majority of the men, of course, in the Army—young officers on short leave, or temporarily invalided, or boys of eighteen just starting their cadet training—she had spent a month full of emotions, not often expressed. For generally she was shy and rather speechless, though none the less liked by her companions for that. But many things sank deep with her; the beauty of mountain and stream; the character of some of the boys she walked and fished with—unnoticed sub-lieutenants, who had come home to get cured of one wound, and were going out again to the immediate chance of another, or worse; the tales of heroism and death of which the Scotch countryside was full. Her own mood was tuned thereby to an ever higher and more tragic key. Nobody indeed of the party was the least tragic. Everybody walked, fished, flirted, and laughed from morning till night. Yet every newspaper, every post, brought news of some death that affected one or other of the large group; and amid all the sheer physical joy of the long days in the open, bathed in sun and wind, there was a sense in all of them—or almost all of them—that no summer now is as the summers of the past, that behind and around the laughter and the picnicking there lay the Shadow that darkens the world.

One gorgeous evening of gold and purple she was sitting by a highland stream with a lad of twenty, throwing ducks and drakes into the water. She was not at all in love with him; but, immature as she was, she could not help seeing that he was a good deal in love with her. He had been in uproarious spirits all the afternoon, and then somehow he had contrived to find this moment alone with her.

'Well, it'll be good-bye to-morrow, or perhaps to-night,' he had said, as he flung yet another stone into the river, and she clapped her hands as she counted no less than six skips along the smooth water.

'And then no leave for a long time?'

'Well, I'd been ten months without any before.'

'Perhaps we'll meet here again—next year.'

'I don't expect it,' he said quietly.

Her startled eyes met his full.

'It'll be worse fighting this winter than last—it'll go on getting worse till the end. I don't look to coming back.'

His tone was so cheerful and matter-of-fact that it confused her.

'Oh, Basil, don't talk like that!' was all she could find to say.

'Why not? Of course it's better not to talk about it. Nobody does. But just this afternoon—when it's been so jolly—here with you, I thought I'd like to say a word. Perhaps you'll remember—'

He threw another stone, and on the moor beyond the stream she heard the grouse calling.

'Remember what?'

'That I was quite willing,' he said simply. 'That's all. It's worth it.'

She could say nothing, but presently her hand dropped its pebble and found its way into his, and he had held it without saying a word for a little while. Then after dinner, with no good-bye to her, he had disappeared by the night train to the south.

And that had been the spirit of all of them, those jolly, rampagious lads, plain or handsome, clever or slow. Two of them were dead already. But the one who had thrown ducks and drakes was still, so far as she knew, somewhere in the Ypres salient, unscathed.

And after that she had come home to the atmosphere created by her father's life and character, in this old house where she was born, and in the estate round about it. It was as though she had only just realized—begun to realize—her father's strangeness. His eccentricities and unpopularity had meant little to her before. Her own real interests had lain elsewhere; and her mind had been too slow in developing to let her appreciate his fundamental difference from other people.

At any rate her father's unpopularity had been lately acute, and Pamela herself felt it bitterly, and shrank from her neighbours and the cottage people. When Desmond came home with a D.S.O., or a Victoria Cross, as of course he would, she supposed it would be all right. But meanwhile not a single thing done for the war!—not a sou to the Red Cross, or to any war funds! And hundreds spent on antiquities—thousands perhaps—getting them deeper and deeper into debt. For she was quite aware that they were in debt; and her own allowance was of the smallest. Two hundred and fifty a year, too, for Miss Bremerton!—when they could barely afford to keep up the garden decently, or repair the house. She knew it was two hundred and fifty pounds. Her father was never reticent about such things, and had named the figure at once.

'Why wasn't Miss Bremerton doing something for the war? Greek indeed! when there was this fearful thing going on!' And in the evening air, as the girl turned her face towards the moonrise, she seemed to hear the booming of the Flanders guns.

And now Miss Bremerton was to do the housekeeping, and to play tutor and chaperon to her. Pamela resented both. If she was not to be allowed to scrub in a hospital, she might at least have learnt some housekeeping at home, for future use. As for the Greek lessons, it was not easy for her to be positively rude to any one, but she promised herself a good deal of passive resistance on that side. For if nothing else was possible, she could always sew and knit for the soldiers. Pamela was not very good at either, but they did something to lessen the moral thirst in her.

Ah, there was the library door. Miss Bremerton coming out—perhaps to propose a lesson! Pamela took to flight—noiseless and rapid—among the bosky corners and walks of the old garden.

Elizabeth emerged, clearly perceiving a gleam of vanishing white in the far distance. She sighed, but not at all sentimentally. 'It's silly how she dislikes me,' she thought. 'I wonder what I can do!'

Then her eye was caught by the tea-table still standing out in the golden dusk, which had now turned damp and chilly. Careless of Pamela not to have sent it away! Elizabeth examined it. Far too many cakes—too much sugar, too much butter, too much everything! And all because the Squire, who seemed to have as great a need of economy as anybody else, if not more, to judge from what she was beginning to know about his affairs, was determined to flout the Food Controller, and public opinion! What about the servants? she wondered.

Perceiving a little silver bell on the table she rang it and waited. Within a couple of minutes Forest emerged from the house. Elizabeth hesitated, then plunged.

'Take away the tea, please, Forest. And—and I should like to consult you. Do you think anybody wants as much tea and cakes in war-time?' She pointed to the table.

Forest paused as he was lifting the silver tray, and put it down again. He looked at the table; then he looked at the lady opposite.

'We servants, Miss, have never been asked what we think. Mr. Mannering—that's not his way.'

'But I may ask it, mayn't I, Forest?'

Forest's intelligent face flamed.

'Well, if we've really to speak out what we think, Miss—that's Cook and me—why, of course, the feeding here—well, it's a scandal! that's what it is. The Master will have it. No change, he says, from what it used to be. And the waste—well, you ask Cook! She can't help it!'

'Has she been here long, Forest?'

'Fifteen years.'

'And you?'

'Twenty-two, Miss.'

'Well, Forest,' Miss Bremerton approached him confidingly, 'don't you think that you, and Cook, and I—you know Mr. Mannering wishes me to do the housekeeping—well, that between us we could do something?'

Forest considered it.

'I don't see why not, Miss,' he said at last, with caution. 'You can reckon on me, that's certain, and on Cook, that's certain too. As for the young uns, we can get round them! They'll eat what they're given. But you'll have to go careful with the Squire.'

Miss Bremerton smiled and nodded. They stood colloguing in the twilight for ten minutes more.

[!-- H2 anchor --]

CHAPTER III

'I say, Pamela, who is this female, and why has she descended on us?'

The speaker was Desmond Mannering. He was sitting on the edge of a much dilapidated arm-chair in the room which had been the twins' "den" from their childhood, in which Pamela's governess even, before the girl's school years, was allowed only on occasional and precarious footing. Here Pamela dabbed in photography, made triumphant piles of the socks and mittens she kept from her father's eye, read history, novels, and poetry, and wrote to her school friends and the boys she had met in Scotland. Ranged along the mantelpiece were numbers of snapshots—groups and single figures—taken by her, with results that showed her no great performer.

At the moment, however, Pamela was engaged in marking Desmond's socks. She was very jealous of her sisterly prerogative in the matter of Desmond's kit, and personal affairs generally. Forest was the only person she would allow to advise her, and one or two innocent suggestions made that morning by her new chaperon had produced a good deal of irritation.

Pamela looked up with a flushed countenance.

'I believe father did it specially that he might be able to tell Alice and Margaret that he hadn't a farthing for their war charities.'

'You mean because she costs so much?'

'Two hundred and fifty,' said Pamela drily.

'My hat!—and her keep! I call that mean of father,' said Desmond indignantly. 'You can't go tick with a secretary. It means cash. There'll never be anything for you, Pam, and nothing for the garden. The two old fellows that were here last week have been turned off, Forest tells me?'

'Father expects me to do the garden,' said Pamela, with rather pinched lips.

'Well, jolly good thing,' laughed her brother. 'Do you a lot of good, Pam. You never get half enough exercise.'

'I wouldn't mind if I were paid wages and could spend the money as I liked.'

'Poor old Pam! It is hard lines. I heard father tell the Rector he'd spent eighteen hundred at that sale.'

'And I'm ashamed to face any of the tradesmen,' said Pamela fiercely. 'Why they go on trusting us I don't know.'

Desmond looked out of the window with a puckered brow—a slim figure in his cadet's uniform. To judge from a picture on the wall behind his head, an enlarged photograph of the late Mrs. Mannering taken a year before the birth of the twins—an event which had cost the mother her life—Desmond resembled her rather than his father. In both faces there was the same smiling youthfulness, combined—as indeed also in Pamela—with something that entirely banished any suggestion of insipidity—something that seemed to say, 'There is a soul here—and a brain.' It had sometimes occurred, in a dreamy way to Pamela, to connect that smile on her mother's face with a line in a poem of Browning's, which she had learnt for recitation at school:

This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together.

Had her mother been happy? That her children could never know.

Desmond's countenance, however, soon cleared. It was impossible for him to frown for long on any subject. He was very sorry for 'old Pam.' His father's opinions and behaviour were too queer for words. He would be jolly worried if he had to stay long at home, like Pamela. But then he wasn't going to be long at home. He was going off to his artillery camp in two days, and the thought filled him with a restless and impatient delight. At the same time he was more tolerant of his father than Pamela was, though he could not have told why.

'Desmond, give me your foot,' Pamela presently commanded.

The boy bared his foot obediently, and held it out while Pamela tried on a sock she had just finished knitting on a new pattern.

'I'm not very good at it,' sighed Pamela. 'Are you sure you can wear them, Dezzy?'

'Wear them? Ripping!' said the boy, surveying his foot at different angles. 'But you know, Pam, I can't take half the things you want me to take. What on earth did you get me a Gieve waistcoat for?'

'How do you know you won't be going to Mesopotamia?'

'Well, I don't know; but I don't somehow think it's very likely. They get their drafts from Egypt, and there's lots of artillery there.'

Pamela remembered with annoyance that Miss Bremerton had gently hinted the same thing when the Gieve waistcoat had been unpacked in her presence. It was true, of course, that she had a brother fighting under General Maude. That, no doubt, did give her a modest right to speak.

'How old do you think she is?' said Desmond, nodding in the direction of the library.

'Well, she's over thirty.'

'She doesn't look it.'

'Oh, Desmond, she does!'

'Let's call her the New Broom—Broomie for short,' said Desmond. 'Look here, Pam, I wish you'd try and like her. I shall have a dreadful hump when I get to camp if I think she's going to make you miserable.'

'Oh, I'll try,' said the girl with dreary resignation. 'You know I'm not to see Beryl again?' She looked up.

Her brother laughed.

'Don't I see you keeping to that! If Aubrey's any good he'll marry her straight away. And then how can father boycott her after that?'

'He will,' said Pamela decisively.

'And if father thinks I'm going to give up Arthur, he's jolly well mistaken,' said the boy with energy. 'Arthur's the best fellow I know, and he's been just ripping to me.'

The young face softened and glowed as though under the stress of some guarded memory. Pamela, looking up, caught her brother's expression and glowed too.

'Beryl says he isn't a bit strong yet. But he's moving heaven and earth to get back to the front.'

'Well, if they don't give him enough to do he'll be pretty sick. He's no good at loafing.'

There was silence a little. Outside a misty sunshine lay on the garden and the park and in it the changing trees were beginning to assume the individuality and separateness of autumn after the levelling promiscuity of the summer. The scene was very English and peaceful; and between it and the two young creatures looking out upon it there were a thousand links of memory and association. Suddenly Desmond said:

'Do you remember that bother I got into at Eton, Pam?'

Pamela nodded. Didn't she remember it? A long feud with another boy—ending in a highly organized fight—absolute defiance of tutor and housemaster on Desmond's part—and threatened expulsion. The Squire's irritable pride had made him side ostentatiously with his son, and Pamela could only be miserable and expect the worst. Then suddenly the whole convulsion had quieted down, and Desmond's last year at Eton had been a very happy one. Why? What had happened? Pamela had never known.

'Well, Arthur heard of it from "my tutor." He and Arthur were at Trinity together. And Arthur came over from Cambridge and had me out for a walk, and jawed me, jawed "my tutor," jawed the Head, jawed everybody. Oh, well no good going into the rotten thing,' said Desmond, flushing, 'but Arthur was awfully decent anyway.'

Pamela assented mutely. She did not want to talk about Arthur Chicksands. There was in her a queer foreboding sense about him. She did not in the least expect him to fall in love with her; yet there was a dim, intermittent fear in her lest he might become too important to her, together with a sharp shrinking from the news, which of course might come any day, that he was going to be married. She had known him from her childhood, had romped and sparred with him. He was the gayest, most charming companion; yet he carried with him, quite unconsciously, something that made it delightful to be smiled at or praised by him, and a distress when you did not get on with him, and were quite certain that he thought you silly or selfish. There was a rumour which reached Mannering after the second battle of Ypres that he had been killed. The Chicksands' household believed it for twenty-four hours.

Then he was discovered—gassed and stunned—in a shell-hole, and there had been a long illness and convalescence. During the twenty-four hours when he was believed to be dead, Pamela had spent the April daylight in the depths of the Mannering woods, in tangled hiding-places that only she knew. It was in the Easter holidays. She was alone at Mannering with an old governess, while her father was in London. The little wrinkled Frenchwoman watched her in silence, whenever she was allowed to see her. Then when on the second morning there came a telegram from Chetworth, and Pamela tore it open, flying with it before she read it to the secrecy of her own room, the Frenchwoman smiled and sighed. 'Ca, c'est l'amour!' she said to herself, 'assurément c'est l'amour!' And when Pamela came down again, radiant as a young seraph, and ready to kiss the apple-red cheek of the Frenchwoman—the rarest concession!—Madame Guérin did not need to be told that Arthur Chicksands was safe and likely to be sound.

But the Frenchwoman's inference was premature. During the two years she had been at school, Pamela had thought very little of Arthur Chicksands. She was absorbed in one of those devotions to a woman—her schoolmistress—very common among girls of strong character, and sometimes disastrous. In her case it had worked well. And now the period of extravagant devotion was over, and the girl's mind and heart set free. She thought she had forgotten Arthur Chicksands, and was certain he must have forgotten her. As it happened they had never met since his return to the front in the autumn of 1915—Pamela was then seventeen and a schoolgirl—or, as she now put it, a baby. She remembered the child who had hidden herself in the woods as something very far away.

And yet she did not want to talk about 'Arthur,' as she had always called him, and there was a certain tremor and excitement in her mind about him. The idea of being prevented from seeing him was absurd—intolerable. She was already devising ways and means of doing it. It was really not to be expected that filial obedience should reign at Mannering.

The twins had long left the subject of the embargo on Chetworth, and were wrangling and chaffing over the details of Desmond's packing, when there was a knock at the door.

Pamela stiffened at once.

'Come in!'

Miss Bremerton entered.

'Are you very busy?'

'Not at all!' said Desmond politely, scurrying with his best Eton manners to find a chair for the newcomer. 'It's an awful muddle, but that's Pamela!'

Pamela aimed a sponge-bag at him, which he dodged, and Elizabeth Bremerton sat down.

'I want to hold a council with you,' she said, turning a face just touched with laughter from one to the other. 'Do you mind?'

'Certainly not,' said Desmond, sitting on the floor with his hands round his knees. 'What's it about?' And he gave Pamela's right foot a nudge with his left by way of conveying to her that he thought her behaviour ungracious. Pamela hurriedly murmured, 'Delighted.'

'I want to tell you about the servants,' said Elizabeth. 'I can't do anything unless you help me.'

'Help you in what?' said Desmond, wondering.

'Well, you know, it's simply scandalous what you're all eating in this house!' exclaimed Elizabeth, with sudden energy. 'You ought to be fined.' She frowned, and her fair Dutch complexion became a bright pink.

'It's quite true,' said Pamela, startled. 'I told father, and he laughed at me.'

'But now even the servants are on strike,' said Elizabeth. 'It's Forest that's been preaching to them. He and Cook have been drawing up a week's menu, according to the proper scale. But—'

'Father won't have it,' said Pamela decidedly.

'An idea has occurred to me,' was Elizabeth's apologetic reply. 'Your father doesn't come in to lunch?'

'Happy thought!' cried Desmond. 'Send him in a Ritz luncheon, while the rest of you starve. Easy enough for me to say as I'm off—and soldiers aren't rationed! We may be as greedy pigs as we like.'

'What do you say?' Elizabeth looked at Pamela. The girl was flattered by the deference shown her, and gradually threw herself into the little plot. How to set up a meatless day for the household, minus the Squire, and not be found out; how to restrict the bread and porridge allowance, while apparently outrunning it—knotty problems! into which the twins plunged with much laughter and ingenuity. At the end of the discussion, Elizabeth said with hesitation, 'I don't like not telling Mr. Mannering, but—'

'Oh no, you can't tell him' said Pamela, in her most resolute tone. 'Besides, it's for the country!'

'Yes, it's the country!' echoed Elizabeth. 'Oh, I'm so glad you agree with me. Forest's splendid!'

'I say, Broomie's not bad,' thought Desmond. Aloud he said, 'Forest's a regular Turk in the servants' hall—rules them all with a rod of iron.'

Elizabeth laughed. 'He tells me there was a joint of cold beef last night for supper, and he carried it away bodily back into the larder. And they all supped on fried potatoes, cheese, oatcake and jam! So then I asked him whether anybody minded, and he said the little kitchen-maid cried a bit, and said she "was used to her vittles and her mother would be dreadfully put out." "'Mother!' says I, 'haven't you got a young man!' And then I give her a real talking to about the war. 'You back your young man,' I said, 'and there's only one way as females can do it—barring them as is in munitions. Every bit of bread you don't eat is helping to kill Boches. And what else is your young man doin'? Where do you say he is? Wipers? You ask him. He'll tell you!' So then we were all nice and comfortable—and you needn't bother about us downstairs. We're all right!"'

'Good old Forest!' laughed Desmond, delighted. 'I always knew he was the real boss here. Father thinks he is, but he can't do without Forest, and the old boy knows it.'

'Well, so that's agreed,' said Elizabeth demurely, as she rose. 'I naturally couldn't do anything without you, but so long as your father gets everything that he's accustomed to—'

'I don't see quite what you're going to do about dinner—late dinner, I mean?' said Pamela pensively.

Elizabeth beamed at her.

'Well, I became a vegetarian last week, except for very occasional break-outs. Fish is a vegetable!'

'I see,' reflected Pamela. 'We can break out now and then at dinner, when father's got his eye on us—'

'And be pure patriots at lunch,' laughed Miss Bremerton, as she opened the door. 'Au revoir! I must go back to work.'

She vanished. The brother and sister looked at each other.

Desmond gave his opinion.

'I believe she's a good sort!'

'"Wait and see,"' said Pamela pompously, and returned to her packing.

The preceding conversation took place during a break in Elizabeth's morning occupations. She had been busily occupied in collecting and copying out some references from Pausanias, under the Squire's direction. He meanwhile had been cataloguing and noting his new possessions, which, thanks to the aid of his henchman Levasseur, had been already arranged. And they made indeed a marvellous addition to the Mannering library and its collections. At the end of the room stood now a huge archaic Nikê, with outstretched peplum and soaring wings. To her left was the small figure, archaic also, of a charioteer, from the excavations at Delphi, amazingly full of life in spite of hieratic and traditional execution. But the most conspicuous thing of all was a mutilated Erôs, by a late Rhodian artist—subtle, thievish, lovely, breathing an evil and daemonic charm. It stood opposite the Nikê, 'on tiptoe for a flight.' And there was that in it which seemed at moments to disorganize the room, and lay violent and exclusive hold on the spectator.

Elizabeth on returning to her table found the library empty. The Squire had been called away by his agent and one of the new officials of the county, and had not yet returned. She expected him to return in a bad—possibly an outrageous temper. For she gathered that the summons had something to do with the decree of the County War Agricultural Committee that fifty acres, at least, of Mannering Park were to be given back to the plough, which, indeed, had only ceased to possess them some sixty years before. The Squire had gone out pale with fury, and she looked anxiously at her work, to see what there might be in it to form an excuse for a hurricane.

She could find nothing, however, likely to displease a sane man. And as she was at a standstill till he came back, she slipped an unfinished letter out of her notebook, and went on with it. It was to a person whom she addressed as 'my darling Dick.'

'I have now been rather more than a month here. You can't imagine what a queer place it is, nor what a queer employer I have struck. There might be no war—as far as Mannering is concerned. The Squire is always engaged in mopping it out, like Mrs. Partington. He takes no newspaper, except a rag called the Lanchester Mail, which attacks the Government, the Army—as far as it dare—and "secret diplomacy." It comes out about once a week with a black page, because the Censor has been sitting on it. Desmond Mannering—that's the gunner-son who came on leave a week ago and is just going off to an artillery camp—and I, conspire through the butler—who is a dear, and a patriot—to get the Times; but the Squire never sees it. Desmond reads it in bed in the morning, I read it in bed in the evening, and Pamela Mannering, Mr. Desmond's twin, comes in last thing, in her dressing-gown, and steals it.

'I seem indeed to be living in the heart of a whirlwind, for the Squire is fighting everybody all round, and as he is the least reticent of men, and I have to write his letters, I naturally, even by now, know a good deal about him. Shortly put, he is in a great mess. The estate is riddled with mortgages, which it would be quite easy to reduce. For instance, there are masses of timber, crying to be cut. He consults me often in the naïvest way. You remember that I trained for six months as an accountant. I assure you that it comes in extremely useful now! I can see my way a little where he can't see it at all. He glories in the fact that he was never any good at arithmetic or figures of any kind, and never looked at either after "Smalls." The estate of course used to be looked after in the good old-fashioned way by the family lawyers. But a few years ago the Squire quarrelled with these gentlemen, recovered all his papers, which no doubt went back to King Alfred, and resolved to deal with things himself. There is an office here, and a small attorney from Fallerton comes over twice or three times a week. But the Squire bosses it. And you never saw anything like his accounts! I have been trying to put some of them straight—just those that concern the house and garden—after six weeks' acquaintance! Odd, isn't it? He is like an irritable child with them. And his agent, who is seventy, and bronchitic, is the greatest fool I ever saw. He neglects everything. His accounts too, as far as I have inspected them, are disgraceful. He does nothing for the farmers, and the farmers do exactly as they please with the land.

'Or did! For now comes the rub. Government is interfering, through the County Committee. They are turning out three of Mr. Mannering's farmers by force, because he won't do it himself, and ploughing up the park. I believe the steam tractor comes next week. The Squire has been employing some new lawyers to find out if he can't stop it somehow. And each time he sees them he comes home madder than before.

'Of course it all comes from a passionate antagonism to the war. He is not a pacifist exactly—he is not a conscientious objector. He is just an individualist gone mad—an egotistical, hot-tempered man, with all the ideas of the old régime, who thinks he can fight the world. I am often really sorry for him—he is so preposterous. But the muddle and waste of it all drives me crazy—you know I always was a managing creature.

'But one thing is certain—that he is a most excellent scholar. I knew I had got rusty, but I didn't know how rusty till I came to work for him. He has a wonderful memory—seems to know every Greek author by heart—and a most delicate and unerring taste. I thought I should find a mere dabbler—an amateur. And it takes all I know to do the drudgery work he gives me. And then he is always coming down upon me. It delights him to find me out in a howler—makes him, in fact, quite good-tempered for twenty minutes.

'As to the rest of the family, there is a charming boy and girl—twins of nineteen, the boy just off to an artillery camp after his cadet training; the girl extremely pretty and distinguished, and so far inclined to think me an intruder and a nuisance. How to get round her I don't exactly know, but I daresay I shall manage it somehow. If she would only set up a love-affair I could soon get the whip-hand of her!

'Then there is the priceless butler, with whom I have already made friends. I seem to have a taste for butlers, though I've never lived with one. He is fifty-two and a volunteer, in stark opposition to the Squire, who jeers at him perpetually. Forest takes it calmly, seems even in a queer way to be attached to his queer master. But he never misses a drill for anybody or any weather, and when he's out, the under-housemaid "buttles" for him like a lamb. The fact is, of course, that he's been here for twenty years, and the Squire couldn't get on for a day without him, or thinks he couldn't. So that his position is, as you may say, strongly entrenched, and counter-attacks are useless.

'The married daughters—Mrs. Gaddesden, who, I think, is an Honourable, and Mrs. Strang—are coming to-morrow to see their brother before he goes into camp. The Squire doesn't want them at all. Ah, there he comes! I'll finish later...'

The Squire came in—to use one of the Homeric similes of which he was so fond—'like a lion fresh from a slain bull, bespattered with blood and mire.' He had gone out pale, he returned crimson, rubbing his hands and in great excitement. And it was evident that he had by now formed the habit of talking freely to his secretary. For he went up to her at once.

'Well, now they know what to expect!' he said, his eyes glittering, and all his thick hair on his small peaked head standing up in a high ridge, like the crest of a battle-helmet.

'Who are "they"?' asked Elizabeth, smiling, as she quietly pushed her letter a little further under the blotting-paper.

'The County Council idiots—no, the Inspector fellow they're sending round.'

'And what did you tell him?'

'That I should resist their entry. The gates of the park will be locked. And my lawyers are already preparing a case for the High Court. Well—eh!—what?'—the speaker wound up impatiently, as though waiting for an immediate and applauding response.

Elizabeth was silent. She bent over the Greek book in front of her, as though looking for her place.

'You didn't think I was going to take it lying down!' asked the Squire, in a raised voice. Her silence suggested to him afresh all the odious and tyrannical forces by which he felt himself surrounded.

Elizabeth turned to him with a cheerful countenance.

'I don't quite understand what "it" means,' she said politely.

'Nonsense, you do!' was the angry reply. 'That's so like a woman. They always want to catch you out; they never see things simply and broadly. You'd like to make yourself out a fool—νηπια—and you're not a fool!'

And with his hands in his pockets he made two or three long strides up to the Nikê, at the further end of the room, and back, pulling up beside her again, as though challenging her reply.

'I assure you, sir, I wasn't trying to catch you out,' Elizabeth began in her gentlest voice.

'Don't call me "sir." I won't have it!' cried the Squire, almost stamping.

Then Elizabeth laughed outright.

'I'm sorry, but when I was working in the War Trade Department I always called the head of my room "sir."'

'That's because women like kow-towing—δουλοσυνην ανεχεσθαι!' said the Squire. Then he threw himself into a chair. 'Now let's talk sense a little.'

Elizabeth's attentive look, and lips quivering with amusement which she tried in vain to suppress, and he was determined not to see, showed her more than willing.

'I suppose you think—like that fellow I've just routed—that it's a uestion of food production. It isn't! It's a question of liberty—versus bondage. If we can only survive as slaves, then wipe us out! That's my view.'

'Wasn't there a bishop once who said he would rather have England free than sober?' asked Elizabeth.

'And a very sensible man,' growled the Squire, 'though in general I've no use for bishops. Now you understand, I hope? This is going to be a test case. I'll make England ring.'

'Are you sure they can't settle it at once, under the Defence of the Realm Act?'

'Not they!' said the Squire triumphantly. 'Of course, I'm not putting up a frontal defence. I'm outflanking them. I'm proving that this is the worst land they could possibly choose. I'm offering them something else that they don't want. Meanwhile the gates shall be locked, and if any one or anything breaks them down—my lawyers are ready—we apply for an injunction at once.'

'And you're not—well, nervous?' asked Miss Bremerton, with a charming air of presenting something that might have been overlooked.

'Nervous of what?'

'Isn't the law—the new law—rather dreadfully strong?'

'Oh, you think I shall end in the county gaol?' said the Squire abruptly. 'Well, of course'—he took a reflective turn up and down—'I've no particular wish just now for the county gaol. It would be an infernal nuisance—in the middle of this book. But I mean to give them as much trouble as I can. I'm all right so far.'

He looked up suddenly, and caught an expression on his secretary's face which called him to order at once, though he was not meant to see it. Contempt?—cold contempt? Something like it.

The Squire drew himself up.

'You've made the arrangements, I suppose, for to-morrow?'

He spoke curtly, as the master of the house to a dependent.

Elizabeth meekly replied that she had done everything according to his directions. Mrs. Gaddesden was to have the South rooms.

'I said the East rooms!'

'But I thought—' Elizabeth began, in consternation.

'You thought wrong,' said the Squire cuttingly. 'Do not trouble yourself. I will tell Forest'

Elizabeth coloured crimson, and went on with her work. The Squire rang the bell. But before Forest could answer it, there was a quick step in the passage, and Desmond came bursting in.

'Pater, I say! it's too fine! You can't frowst all day at this nonsense. Come out, and let's shoot those roots of Milsom's. He told me yesterday there were five or six coveys in his big field alone. Of course everybody's been poaching for all they're worth. But there's some left. Forest'll get us some sandwiches. He says he'll come and load for you. His boy and the garden boy'll do for beaters.'

The Squire stood glumly hesitating, but with his eye on his son.

'Look here,' said Desmond, 'I've only got two days!'

Elizabeth could not help watching the boy—his look at his father, the physical beauty and perfection of him. The great Victory at the end of the room with her outstretched wings seemed to be hovering above him.

'Well, I don't mind,' said the Squire slowly.

Desmond gave a laugh of triumph, twined his arm in that of his father, and dragged him away.

'DEAR BELOVED DICK—I must just finish this before dinner. Oh, how I like to think of you at Baghdad, with trees and shade, and civilized quarters again, after all you've gone through. Have you got my letters, and those gauze things I sent you for the hot weather? They tell me here they're right. But how's one to know? Meanwhile, my dear, here are your mother and sister on their knees to you, just to be told what you want. Try and want something!—there's a dear.

'Mother's fairly well—I mean as well as we can expect after such an illness. My salary here enables me to give her a proper trained nurse, and to send Jean to school. As to the rest, don't trouble about me, old man. Sometimes I think it was my pride more than anything else that was hurt a year ago. Anyway I find in myself a tremendous appetite for work. In spite of his oddities, Mr. Mannering is a most stimulating critic and companion. My work is interesting, and I find myself steeped once more in the most fascinating, the most wonderful of all literatures! What remains unsatisfied in me is the passion which you know I have always had for setting things straight—organizing, tidying up! Not to speak of other passions—for work directly connected with the war, for instance—which have had to be scrapped for a time. I can't bear the muddle and waste of this place. It gets on my nerves. Perhaps, if I stay, I may get a chance. I have made a small beginning—with the food. But I won't bother you with it.

'Above all, I must try and make friends with the twins. Desmond would be easy, but he's going. Pamela will be more difficult. However, I shall do my best. As I have already said, if she would only set up a flirtation—a nice one—that I could aid and abet!

'What will the married sisters be like? Desmond and Pamela say very little. All I know is that Alice—that's Mrs. Gaddesden—is to have a fire in her room all day, though the weather now is like July. To judge from her photographs, she is fair, rather pretty, stout and lethargic. Whereas Margaret is as thin almost as her father, and head-over-ears in war charities. She lives, says Pamela, on arrowroot and oatcake, to set an example, and her servants leave her regularly every month.

'Well, we shall see. I run on like this, because you say you like to be gossipped to; and I am just a little lonely here—sometimes. Good-night, and good-bye.—Your devoted sister,

'ELIZABETH.'

[!-- H2 anchor --]

CHAPTER IV

'Come in!' said Alice Gaddesden in a languid tone. From the knock, sharp and loud, on her bedroom door, she guessed that it was her sister Margaret who wished to see her. She did not wish, however, to see Margaret at all. Margaret, who was slightly the elder, tired and coerced her. But she had no choice.

Mrs. Strang entered briskly.

'My dear Alice! what a time of day to be in bed! Are you really ill?'

Mrs. Gaddesden grew red with annoyance.

'I thought I had told you, Margaret, that Dr. Crother advised me more than a year ago not to come down till the middle of the morning. It rests my heart.'

Mrs. Strang, who had come up to the bedside, looked down upon her sister with amused eyes. She herself was curiously like the Squire, even as to her hair, which was thick and fair, and already whitening, though she was not yet thirty. Human thinness could hardly have been carried further than she and the Squire achieved it. She had her father's nose also. But the rest of her features were delicately regular, and her quick blue eyes were those of a woman who told no falsehoods herself, and had little patience with other people's.

'My dear Alice, why do you believe doctors? They always tell you what you want to hear. I am sure you told Dr. Crother exactly what to say,' said Margaret, laughing, as she placed a chair by the bedside.

'Oh, of course I know you think everybody's a sham who isn't as strong as yourself!' said Mrs. Gaddesden, sinking back on her pillows with a soft sigh of resignation. 'Though I think you might have remembered the horribly hard work I've been doing lately.'

'Have you?' Mrs. Strang wrinkled her brow, as though in an effort to recollect. 'Oh, yes, I know. I have always been getting notices lately with your name on them, at the end of a long tail beginning with a Duchess, and stuffed with Countesses. And I always think—there's Alice doing the work, and the Countesses getting the glory. Do you really do the work?'

And Margaret, who did not often see her sister, and was of a genuinely inquiring turn of mind, turned upon her a penetrating look.

'Well, of course,' said Mrs. Gaddesden, a little confused, 'there are always the secretaries.'

'Ah-ha!' Mrs. Strang laughed—one might almost say crowed. 'Yes, indeed, if it weren't for the secretaries! By the way, what do you think about the specimen here?'

Mrs. Gaddesden lost her languid air at once. She sat up among her pillows, a reasonably pretty woman, not without some likeness to Pamela, in points that did not matter.

'My dear Margaret,' she said, with emphasis, 'this has got to be watched!—watched, I tell you.'

Mrs. Strang opened her eyes wide.

'What on earth do you mean?'

Alice Gaddesden smiled.

'Well, of course, you're much cleverer than I am, but I really do see further in practical matters than you do. Haven't you noticed,' she bent forward, looking mysterious and intent, 'how already father depends upon her, how she's beginning to run the whole show—and she hasn't been here much more than six weeks? My dear Margaret, with a secretary like that you never can tell!'

'Well,' said Mrs. Strang coolly, 'and what then?'

'Oh, well, of course, if you're prepared to see a person like that—in our mother's place!'

'"A person like that"—how dreadfully old-fashioned you are, Alice! She's a lady; she's much more highly educated than you or I, and if she gets her way, she'll perhaps keep father out of some of the scrapes he seems bent on. You know this business of the park is perfectly mad!'

For the first time in this conversation Margaret Strang's face was grave. And when it was grave, some people would have called it fine.

'And just think what it'll cost,' said Mrs. Gaddesden despondently, 'even if he had a case—which he probably hasn't—and if he were to win it. There'll be no money left for Aubrey or any of us soon.'

'But of course he hasn't a case, and of course he can't win!' cried Margaret Strang. 'It's not that I care about—or the money—it's the disgrace!'

'Yes,' murmured Alice doubtfully.

'When you think—'

Mrs. Strang paused; her bright blue eyes, alive with thoughts, were fixed absently on her sister. She seemed to see a number of shabby streets, where she was accustomed to work, with little shabby shops, and placards on them—'No butter,' 'No milk,' and apples marked 4d. each.

'Think what?' said Alice.

Mrs. Strang's mind returned to Alice, and Alice's very elaborate and becoming negligée.

'Only that, in my opinion, it's the duty of every landowner to produce every ounce of food he can, and to do what he's told! And father not only sets a shocking example, but he picks this absurd quarrel with the Chicksands. What on earth is Aubrey to do? Or poor Beryl?'

'Well, he comes to-night,' said Alice, 'so I suppose we shall hear. I can't make Aubrey out,' she added reflectively.

'Nobody can. I was talking to a brother-officer of his last week, a man who's awfully fond of him. He told me Aubrey did his work very well. He was complimented by Headquarters on his School only last month. But he's like an automaton. Nobody really knows him, nobody gets any forwarder with him. He hardly speaks to anybody except on business. The mess regard him as a wet blanket, and his men don't care about him, though he's a capital officer. Isn't it strange, when one thinks of what Aubrey used to be five years ago?'

Alice agreed. Perhaps he was still suffering from the effects of his wound in 1915.

'Anyway he can't give Beryl up,' said Margaret with energy, 'if he's a man of honour!'

Alice shrugged her shoulders.

'Then he'll give up the estate, according to father.'

'Desmond would give it back to him, if there's anything left of it, or if he wants it.'

'Margaret!'

'You think I don't care about the family—that there should always be a Mannering of Mannering? Yes, I do care, but there are so many other things now to care about,' added Mrs. Strang slowly.

'Who's making me late now?' said Alice, looking at her watch.

Margaret took the hint and departed.

That same evening, in the September dusk, a dog-cart arrived at the Hall, bringing Major Mannering and a Gladstone bag.

Pamela and Desmond rushed out to meet him. Their elder sisters were dressing for dinner, and the Squire was in the library with Elizabeth. The twins dragged the newcomer into their own den, and shut the door upon him. There Desmond gave him a breathless survey of the situation, while Pamela sat on a stool at his feet, and put in explanatory words at intervals. Their father's extraordinary preparations for waging war against the County Committee; his violence on the subject of the Chicksands; Beryl's despairing letters to Pamela; a letter from Arthur Chicksands to Desmond,—all these various items were poured out on the newcomer, with an eagerness and heat which showed the extreme interest which the twins took in the situation.

Meanwhile Aubrey Mannering sat listening almost in silence. He was a delicately built, distinguished-looking man, who carried a large scar on his forehead, and had lost a finger of the left hand. The ribbons on his breast showed that he was both an M.C. and a D.S.O.—distinctions won at the second battle of Ypres and on the Somme. While the twins talked, his eyes travelled from one to the other, attentive, but curiously aloof.

He was saying to himself that Pamela was extremely pretty, and Desmond a splendid fellow. Then—in a moment—while he looked at his young brother, a vision, insistent, terrible, passed ghost-like between him and the boy. Again and again he tried to shake it off, and again and again it interposed.

'Oh, Aubrey, what will you do?' said Pamela despairingly, leaning her head against her brother's knee.

Her voice recalled him. He laid his hand upon her beautiful hair.

'Well, dear, there's only one thing, of course, for me to do—to stick to Beryl and let father do his worst.'

'Hurrah!' said Desmond. 'That's all right. And of course you know, Aubrey, that if father tries any hankey-pankey with the estate, and leaves it to me, I shall give it back to you next day.'

Aubrey smiled. 'Father'll live another twenty years, old man. Will there be any England then, or any law, or any estates to leave?'

The twins looked at him in amazement. Again he recovered himself quickly.

'I only meant that, in times like these, it's no good planning anything twenty years ahead. We've got to win the war, haven't we?—that's the first thing. Well, now, I must go and clean up. Who's here?'

'Alice and Margaret,' said Pamela. 'And father's new secretary.'

'You never told me about him,' said Aubrey indifferently, as he rose.

'"Him" indeed!' laughed Desmond. 'Nothing of the sort!'

Aubrey turned a puzzled look upon him.

'What! a lady?'

Desmond grinned.

'First Class in Mods, and an awful swell. Father can't let her out of his sight. Says he never had anybody so good.'

'And she'll end by bossing us all,' put in Pamela. 'She's begun it already. Now you really must go and dress.'

When the eldest son of the house entered the drawing-room, he found everybody gathered there but his father and the Rector, who was coming to dine. He was at once seized on by his married sisters, who saw him very rarely. Then Pamela led him up to a tall lady in pale blue.

'My eldest brother—Miss Bremerton.'

He looked at her with curiosity, and was glad when, after the arrival of his father and the Rector, it fell to him to take the new secretary in to dinner. His father's greeting to him had been decidedly cool—the greeting of a man who sees a fight impending and wishes to give away nothing to his opponent. In fact the two men had never been on really cordial terms since August 1914, when Aubrey had thrown up his post in the Foreign Office to apply for one of the first temporary commissions in the New Army. The news came at a moment when the Squire was smarting under the breakdown of a long-cherished scheme of exploration in the Greek islands, which was to have been realized that very autumn—a scheme towards which his whole narrow impetuous mind had been turned for years. No more Hellenic or Asia Minor excavations! no more cosmopolitan Wissenschaft! On that fatal August 4 a whole world went down submerged beneath the waves of war, and the Squire cared for no other. His personal chagrin showed itself in abuse of the bungling diplomats and 'swashbuckler' politicians who, according to him, had brought us into war. So that when Aubrey applied for a commission, the Squire, mainly to relieve his own general irritation, had quarrelled with him for some months, and was only outwardly reconciled when his son came home invalided in 1915.

During the summer of 1917, Aubrey, after spending three days' leave at Mannering, had gone on to stay at Chetworth with the Chicksands for a week. The result of that visit was a letter to his father in which he announced his engagement to Beryl. The Squire could make then no open opposition, since he was still on friendly terms with Sir Henry, who had indeed done him more than one good turn. But in reply to his son's letter, he stood entirely on the defensive, lest any claim should be made upon him which might further interfere with the passion of his life. He was not, he said, in a position to increase Aubrey's allowance—the Government robbers had seen to that—and unless Beryl was prepared to be a poor man's wife he advised them to wait till after the war. Then Sir Henry had ridden over to Mannering with a statement of what he was prepared to do for his daughter, and the Squire had given ungracious consent to a marriage in the spring. Chicksands knew his man too well to take offence at the Squire's manners, and Beryl was for a time too timidly and blissfully happy to be troubled by them.

'You have been here a few weeks,' said the newcomer to Elizabeth, when the party had settled down at table.

'About six weeks. It seems longer!' smiled Elizabeth.

'You are doing some work for my father?'

Elizabeth explained herself. Major Mannering listened attentively.

'So what you do for him is literary—and historical?'

'Oh no—I do accounts, and write letters too.'

'Accounts? I thought there was a housekeeper?'

'She went a month ago to the W.A.A.C.'s. Please!—do you mind?' And to his amazement, as he was putting out his hand automatically to a piece of bread lying on his left, Miss Bremerton's hand holding a fork neatly intercepted him, and moved the bread away.

'It's our "Self-denying Ordinance,"' explained the lady, colouring a little. 'The bread appears because—because your father doesn't think rations necessary. But no one touches it, and Forest collects it afterwards—for breakfast.'

A smile broke on Aubrey's grave and pensive face.

'I see. Mayn't I really have any?'

Elizabeth hesitated.

'Well, perhaps, as a guest, and a soldier. Yes, I think you may.' And she would have restored her prey had not her neighbour stopped her.

'Not at all. As a soldier I obey orders. My hat! how you've drilled them all!' For, looking round the table, he saw that not a single guest had touched the bread lying to their left.

'That's Pamela and Mr. Desmond! They've given everybody a menu for three days.'

'Good heavens—not my father!'

'Oh no, no! We don't think he suspects anything, and he has everything he likes.'

'And my married sisters?' Elizabeth hesitated again.

'Well, Mrs. Gaddesden is rather afraid of being starved. Mrs. Strang, on the other hand, thinks we're wickedly extravagant!'

Her neighbour was so much amused that conversation flowed on easily thenceforward; and Desmond opposite whispered to Pamela:

'Just look at Broomie! She's actually making Aubrey talk.'

The Major's rôle, however, was on the whole that of listener. For Elizabeth meant to talk—meant to explain herself to the son and heir, and, if she could, to drive him to an interest in the family affairs. To her trained, practical mind the whole clan seemed by now criminally careless and happy-go-lucky. The gardens were neglected; so was the house; so was the estate. The gardens ought to have been made self-supporting; there were at least a third too many servants in the house; and as for the estate, instead of being a profit-making and food-producing concern, as it should have been, it was a bye-word for bad management and neglected land. She did not pretend to know much about it yet; but what she did know roused her. England was at grips with a brutal foe. The only weapon that could defeat her was famine—the sloth and waste of her own sons. This woman, able, energetic, a lover of her country, could not conceal her scorn for such a fatal incompetence. Naturally, in talking to the eldest son, she made the agent her scapegoat for the sins of the owner. The Squire's responsibility was carefully masked. But Aubrey Mannering perfectly understood what she would be at. She was a clever woman who wanted things improved. Well, let her improve them. It did not matter to him.

But she appeared to him as a somewhat special type of the modern woman, with her advanced education and her clear brain; and for a time he observed her curiously. The graceful dress, pale blue with touches of black, which exactly became her fair skin, the bright gold of her hair, and the pleasant homeliness of her face—her general aspect indeed—attracted him greatly. She might know Greek; at heart, he believed, she was a good housewife; and when she incidentally mentioned Dutch relations, he seemed to see her with a background of bright pots and pans, mopping tiled floors.

But presently he ceased to pay much attention to her. His dreamy sense became aware of the scene as a whole; the long table; his father's fantastic figure at the head of it; Alice Gaddesden elaborately dressed and much made up on the one side, his sister Margaret in a high black gown, erect and honest, on the other; Desmond and Pamela together, chatting and chaffing with the Rector. It was the room so familiar to his childhood and youth, with the family pictures, the Gainsborough full-length of his very plain great-grandmother in white satin at the end, two or three Vandyck school-portraits of seventeenth-century Mannerings, and the beautiful Hogarth head—their best possession—that was so like Pamela. The furniture of the room was of many different dates—incongruous, shabby, and on the whole ugly. The Mannerings of the past had not been an artistic lot.

Nor had the room—the house indeed—many tender associations for him. His childhood had not been very happy. He had never got on with his father, and his mother, who had been the victim of various long illnesses during his boyhood, had never, unluckily, meant much to him. He knew that he was of a very old stock, which had played a long and considerable part in the world; but the fact brought him no thrill. 'That kind of thing is played out,' he thought. Let his father disinherit him—he was quite indifferent.

Then, as he fell silent beside his father's new secretary, the table vanished. He saw instead the wide Picardy flats, a group of poplars, a distant wood, and in front a certain hollow strewn with dead and dying men—one figure, in front of the rest, lying face downwards. The queer twisted forms, the blasted trees, the inexorable horror—the whole vision swept over him again, as it had done in the schoolroom. His nerves shrank and trembled under it.

Beryl—poor little Beryl! What a wretch he had been to propose to her—in a moment of moral and physical weakness, when it had seemed a simple thing to accept her affection and to pledge his own! But if she stood by him, he must stand by her. And he had had the kindest letter from Sir Henry, and some sweet tremulous words from her. Suppose she offered to release him? His heart leapt guiltily at the thought. What, indeed, had a man so haunted and paralysed to give to a girl like Beryl? It was an outrage—it ought to cease.

But as to his father, that was simple enough.

The Squire and his eldest son retreated to the library after dinner, and all the rest of the party waited uneasily to see what would happen. Elizabeth did her best to keep things going. It might have been noticed—it was noticed by at least two of the persons present—that quite unobtrusively, she was already the mistress of the house. She found a stool and a fire-screen for Mrs. Gaddesden; she held some wool for Mrs. Strang to wind; and a backgammon board was made ready for the Squire, in case he returned.

But he did not return. Aubrey came back alone, and found them all hanging on his entrance. Pamela put down her knitting and looked at him anxiously; so did the elder sisters. He went up absently to the chimney-piece, and stood leaning against it.

'Well?' said Pamela in a low voice, as she came to sit on a stool near him.

He smiled, but she saw that he was pale.

'Can you take me over to Chetworth to-morrow—early—in the pony-cart?'

'Yes, certainly.'

'Half-past ten?'

'Right you are.'

No more was said. Aubrey turned at once to Alice Gaddesden and proposed a round game. He played it with much more spirit than usual, and Desmond's antics in 'Animal Grab' put all serious notions to flight.

But when the game was over, and Forest brought in the candles, Margaret tried to get some information.

'You found the father reasonable?' she said to her brother in an undertone, as they stood together by the fire.

'Oh, yes,' was the indifferent answer, 'from his own point of view.'

And when he had lit their candles for his sisters, he excused himself at once on the ground of being dog-tired after a long day. The door closed upon him.

The family gathered together in a group, while the Rector and Elizabeth talked about the village at the further end of the room.

'They've quarrelled!' said Margaret decisively.

Alice Gaddesden, because it was Margaret's opinion, disagreed. There was nothing to show it, she said. Aubrey had been quite calm. Desmond broke out, 'Did you ever see Aubrey anything else?' Pamela said nothing, but she slipped out to tell Forest about the pony-cart.

Meanwhile the Rector had looked at his watch, and came up to take his leave.

'Has the Squire gone to bed?' he said cheerfully. 'I daresay. He works so hard. Give him my fare-wells.'

And he went off, quite aware, both from his knowledge of the family and of the Squire's recent actions, that there were storms brewing in the old house, but on the whole thinking more of the new secretary than of his old friends. A charming woman!—most capable! For the first time he might get some attention paid to the village people. That child with the shocking bow-legs. Poor little Pamela had tried to do her best. But this woman would see to it; she knew how to get things done.

Meanwhile, as the rest of the party dispersed, Forest brought a message to Elizabeth. 'The Squire would be glad if you would spare him a few minutes, Miss, in the library. He won't keep you long.'

Elizabeth went unwillingly.

The library was in darkness, except for one small lamp at the further end, and the Squire was walking up and down. He stopped abruptly as he saw his secretary.

'I won't keep you, Miss Bremerton, but do you happen to know at all where my will is?'

'Your will, Mr. Mannering?' said Elizabeth in amazement. 'No, indeed! I have never seen it.'

'Well, it's somewhere here,' said the Squire impatiently. 'I should have thought in all your rummagings lately you must have come across it. I took it away from those robbers, my old solicitors, and I wasn't going to give it to the new man—don't trust him particularly not to talk. So I locked it up here—somewhere. And I can't find it.' And he began restlessly to open drawer after drawer, which already contained piles of letters and documents, neatly and systematically arranged, with the proper dockets and sub-headings, by Elizabeth.

'Oh, it can't be there!' cried Elizabeth. 'I know everything in those drawers. Surely it must be in the office?' By which she meant the small and hideously untidy room on the ground floor into which masses of papers of all dates, still unsorted, had been carted down from London.

'It isn't in the office!' He was, she saw, on the brink of an outburst. 'I put it somewhere in this room my own self! And I should have thought by now you knew the geography of this place as well as I do!'

Elizabeth raised her eyebrows, but said nothing. The big room indeed was still full to her of unexplored territory, with caches of all kinds in it, new and ancient, waiting to be discovered. She looked round her in perplexity, not knowing where to begin. A large part of the room was walled with glass cases, holding vases, bronzes, and other small antiquities, down to about a yard from the floor, and the space below being filled by cupboards and drawers. Elizabeth made a vague movement towards a particular set of cupboards which she knew she had not yet touched, but the Squire irritably stopped her.

'It's certainly not there. That bit of the room hasn't been disturbed since the Flood! Now those drawers'—he pointed—'might be worth looking at.'

She hurried towards them. But the Squire, instead of helping her in her search, resumed his walk up and down, muttering to himself. As for her, she was on the verge of laughter, the laughter that comes from nerves and fatigue; for she had had a long day's work and was really tired. The first drawer she opened was packed with papers, a few arranged in something like order by her predecessor, the London University B.A., but the greater part of them in confusion. They mostly related to a violent controversy between the Squire and various archæological experts with regard to some finds in the Troad a year or two before the war, in which the Squire had only just escaped a serious libel suit, whereof indeed all the preliminaries were in the drawer.

On the very top of the drawer, however, was a conveyance of a small outlying portion of the Mannering estate, which the Squire had sold to a neighbour only a year before this date. Hopeless! If that was there, anything might be anywhere!

Was she to spend the night searching for the needle in this bottle of hay? Elizabeth's face began to twitch with uncomfortable merriment. Should she go and knock up the housekeeper and instal her as chaperon, or take a stand, and insist on going to bed like a reasonable woman?

She hunted through three drawers. The Squire meanwhile paced incessantly, sometimes muttering to himself. Every time he came within the circle of lamplight his face was visible to Elizabeth, wrinkled and set, with angry eyes; and she saw him as a person possessed by a stubborn demon of self-will. Once, as he passed her, she heard him say to himself, 'Of course I can write another at once—half a sheet will do.'

She replaced the third drawer. Was the Squire to have a monopoly of stubbornness? She thought not. Waves of indefinite but strong indignation were beginning to sweep through her. Why was the Squire hunting for his will? What had he been saying to his son—his son who bore on his breast and on his body the marks of his country's service?

She rose to her feet.

'I can't find anything, Mr. Mannering. And I think, if you will allow me, I will go to bed.'

He looked at her darkly.

'I see. You are a person who stickles for your hours—you won't do anything extra for me.' There was a sneer in his tone.

Elizabeth felt her cheeks suddenly burn. In the dim light she looked amazingly tall, as she stood straightened to her full height, confronting this man who really seemed to her to be only half sane.

'I think I have done a great deal for you, Mr. Mannering. But if you don't think so we had better end my engagement!'

His countenance changed at once. He eagerly apologized. He was perfectly aware of her extraordinary merits, and should be entirely lost without her help. The fact was he had had a painful scene, and was overdone.

Elizabeth received his explanation very coldly, only repeating, 'May I go to bed?'

The Squire drew his hand across his eyes.

'It is not very late—not yet eleven.' He pointed to the grandfather clock opposite. 'If you will only wait while I write something?'—he pointed to a chair. 'Just take a book there, and give me a quarter of an hour, no more—I want your signature, that's all. We won't look any further for the will. I can do all I want by a fresh document. I have been thinking it over, and can write it in ten minutes. I know as much about it as the lawyers—more. Now do oblige me. I am ashamed of my discourtesy. I need not say that I regard you as indispensable—and—I think I have been able to do something for your Greek.'

He smiled—a smile that was like a foam-flake on a stormy sea. But he could put on the grand manner when he chose, and Elizabeth was to some extent propitiated. After all he and his ways were no longer strange to her. Very unwillingly she seated herself again, and he went rapidly to his writing-table.

Then silence fell, except for the scratching of the Squire's pen. Elizabeth sat pretending to read, but in truth becoming every moment the prey of increasing disquiet. What was he going to ask her to sign? She knew nothing of his threat to his eldest son—nothing, that is, clear or direct, either from himself or from the others; but she guessed a good deal. It was impossible to live even for a few weeks in close contact with the Squire without guessing at most things.

In the silence she became aware of the soft autumn wind—October had just begun—playing with a blind on a distant window. And through the window came another sound—Desmond and Pamela, no doubt, still laughing and talking in the schoolroom.

The Squire rose from his seat.

'I shall be much obliged,' he said formally, 'if you will kindly come here. We shall want another witness, of course. I will call Forest.'

Elizabeth approached, but paused a yard or two from him. He saw her in the light—her gold hair and brilliant dress illuminated against the dark and splendid background of the Nikê in shadow.

She spoke with hesitation.

'I confess I should like to know, Mr. Mannering, what it is you are asking me to sign.'

'That doesn't matter to a witness. It is nothing which will in any way compromise you.'

'No—but'—she drew herself up—'I should blame myself if I made it easier for you to do something you would afterwards regret.'

'What do you mean?'

She summoned all her courage.

'Of course I must know something. You have not kept your affairs very secret. I guess that you are angry with your son, with Major Mannering. If this thing you ask me to sign is to hurt—to injure him—if it is—well, then—I refuse to sign it!'

And with a sudden movement she threw both her hands behind her back and clasped them there.

'You refuse?'

'If you admit my description of that paper.' She motioned towards it as it lay on the writing-table.

'I have no objection whatever to your knowing what it is—as you seem determined to know,' he said sarcastically. 'It is a codicil revoking my will in favour of my eldest son, and leaving all the property of which I die possessed, and which is in my power to bequeath, to my younger son Desmond. What have you to do with that? What possible responsibility can you have?'

Elizabeth wavered, but held her ground, though in evident distress.

'Only that—if I don't sign it—you would have time to consider it again. Mr. Mannering—isn't it—isn't it—very unjust?'

The Squire laughed.

'How do you know that in refusing you are not unjust to Desmond?'

'Oh no!' she said fervently. 'Mr. Desmond would never wish to supplant his brother—and for such a reason. And especially—' she paused.

There were tears rising in her throat.

'Especially—what? Upon my word, you claim a rather remarkable knowledge of my family—in six weeks!'

'I do know something of Desmond!' Her voice showed her agitation. 'He is the dearest, the most generous boy. In a few months he will be going out—he will be saying good-bye to you all.'

'And then?'

'Is this a time to make him unhappy—to send him out with something on his mind?—something that might even—'

'Well, go on!'

'Might even make him wish'—her voice dropped—'not to come back.'

There was silence. Then the Squire violently threw down the pen he was holding on the table beside him.

'Thank you, Miss Bremerton. That will do. I bid you good-night!'

Elizabeth did not wait to be told twice. She turned and fled down the whole length of the library. The door at the further end closed upon her.

'A masterful young woman!' said the Squire after a moment, drawing a long breath. Then he took up the codicil, thrust it into a drawer of his writing-table, lit a cigarette, and walked up and down smoking it. After which he went to bed and slept remarkably well.

Elizabeth cried herself to sleep. No comforting sprite whispered to her that she had won the first round in an arduous campaign. On the contrary, she fully expected dismissal on the morrow.

[!-- H2 anchor --]

CHAPTER V

It was a misty but warm October day, and a pleasant veiled light lay on the pillared front of Chetworth House, designed in the best taste of a fastidious school. The surroundings of the house, too, were as perfect as those of Mannering were slatternly and neglected. All the young men had long since gone from the gardens, but the old labourers and the girls in overalls who had taken their places, under the eye of a white-haired gardener, had been wonderfully efficient so far. Sir Henry supposed he ought to have let the lawns stand for hay, and the hedges go unclipped; but as a matter of fact the lawns had never been smoother, or the creepers and yew hedges more beautifully in order, so that even the greatest patriot fails somewhere.

Beryl Chicksands was walking along a stone-flagged path under a yew hedge, from which she commanded the drive and a bit of the road outside. Every now and then she stopped to peer into the sunlit haze that marked the lower slopes of the park, and the delicate hand that shaded her eyes shook a little.

Aubrey was coming—and she was going seriously to offer to give him up—to try to persuade him indeed to break it off. Since her first agitated letter to him begging him not to think of her, but to decide only what was best for his own future, she had received a few words from him.

'DEAREST BERYL—Nothing has happened to interfere with what we promised each other last summer—nothing at all! My poor father seems to be half out of his mind under the stress of war. If he does what he threatens, it will matter very little to me; but of course you must consider it carefully, for I shall have uncommonly little in the worldly way to offer you. Your father has written very kindly, and your dear little note is just like you. But you must consider.

'I sometimes doubt whether my father will do what he threatens, but we should have to take the risk. Anyway we shall meet directly, and I am always, and unalterably, your devoted

'AUBREY.'

That had been followed by a boyish note from Desmond—dear, jolly fellow!

'My father's clean daft! Don't bother, my dear Beryl. If he tries to leave me this funny old place, instead of Aubrey, well, there are two can play at that game. I wouldn't touch it with a barge-pole. You and A. have only got to stick it a little, and it'll be all right.

'I've given him a bit of my mind about the park and the farm. He stands it from me and only chaffs. That's because he always treats me like a baby.

'Very sorry I can't come on Tuesday with Aubrey, but there's some good-bye calls I must pay. Hope Arthur will be about. I want awfully to see him. Hard luck his being hit like that, after all the rest. Snipers are beasts!

'P.S.—You can't think what a brainy young woman father's got for his new secretary. And she's not half bad either. Pamela's rather silly about her, but she'll come round.'

Beryl paid small attention to the postscript. She had heard a good deal from Pamela about the newcomer, but it did not concern her. As to the business aspect of the Squire's behaviour, Beryl was well aware that she was an heiress. Aubrey would lose nothing financially by giving up the Mannering estate to marry her. Personally she cared nothing about Mannering, and she had enough for both. But still there was the old name and place. How much did he care about it? how much would he regret it? Supposing his extraordinary father really cut him off?

Beryl felt she did not know. And therewith came the recurrent pang—how little she really knew about the man to whom she was engaged! She adored him. Every fibre in her slight sensitive body still remembered the moment when he first kissed her, when she first felt his arm about her. But since—how often there had been moments when she had been conscious of a great distance between them—of something that did not fit—that jarred!

For herself, she could never remember a time since she was seventeen when Aubrey Mannering had not meant more to her than any one else in the world. On his first departure to France, she had said good-bye to him with secret agonies of spirit, which no one guessed but her mother, a colourless, silent woman, who had a way of knowing unexpectedly much of the people about her. Then when he was badly wounded in some fighting near Festubert, in May 1915, and came home for two months' leave, he seemed like a stranger, and Beryl had not known what to be at with him. She was told that he had suffered very much—it had been a severe thigh wound implicating the sciatic nerve—and that he had been once, at least, very near to death. But when she tried to express sympathy with what he had gone through, or timidly to question him about it, her courage fled, her voice died in her throat. There was something unapproachable in her old playfellow, something that held her, and indeed every one else, at bay.

He was always courteous, and mostly cheerful. But his face in repose had an absent, haunted look, the eyes alert but fixed on vacancy, the brow overcast and frowning. In the old days Aubrey's smile had been his best natural gift. To win a smile from him in her childhood, Beryl would have done anything—have gone on her knees up the drive, or offered up the only doll she cared for, or gone without jam for a week. Now when he came home invalided, she had the same craving; but what she craved for came her way very rarely. He would laugh and talk with her as with other people. But that exquisite brightness of eye and lip, which seemed to be for one person only, and, when it came, to lift that person to the seventh heaven, she waited for in vain.

Then he went back to France, and in due course came the Somme. Aubrey Mannering went through the whole five months without a scratch. He came back with a D.S.O. and a Staff appointment for a short Christmas leave, everybody, except his father, turning out to welcome him as the local hero. Then, for a time, he went to Aldershot as the head of an Officers' School there, and was able to come down occasionally to Chetworth or Mannering.

During that first Christmas leave he paid several visits to Chetworth, and evidently felt at home there. To Lady Chicksands, whom most people regarded as a tiresome nonentity, he was particularly kind and courteous. It seemed to give him positive pleasure to listen to her garrulous housekeeping talk, or to hold her wool for her while she wound it. And as she, poor lady, was not accustomed to such attention from brilliant young men, his three days' visit was to her a red-letter time. With Sir Henry also he was on excellent terms, and made just as good a listener to the details of country business as to Lady Chicksands' domestic tales.

And yet to Beryl he was in some ways more of a riddle than ever. He talked curiously little about the war—at least to her. He had a way of finding out, both at Chicksands and Mannering, men who had lost sons in France, and when he and Beryl took a walk, it seemed to Beryl as though they were constantly followed by friendly furtive looks from old labourers who passed them on the road, and nodded as they went by. But when the daily war news was being discussed he had a way of sitting quite silent, unless his opinion was definitely asked. When it was, he would answer, generally in a rather pessimistic spirit, and escape the conversation as soon as he could. And the one thing that roused him and put him out of temper was the easy complacent talk of people who were sure of speedy victory and talked of 'knock-out' blows.

Then six months later, after the capture of the Messines Ridge, in which he took part, he reappeared, and finding his father, apparently, almost intolerable, and Pamela and Desmond away, he migrated to Chetworth. And there he and Beryl were constantly thrown together. He never talked to her with much intimacy; he certainly never made love to her. But suddenly she became aware that she had grown very necessary to him, that he missed her when she was away, that his eyes lit up when she came back. A special relation was growing up between them. Her father perceived it; so did her brother Arthur; and they had both done their best to help it on. They were both very fond of Aubrey; and nothing could be more natural than that she should marry one who had been her neighbour and playmate from childhood.

The thing drifted on, and one day, in the depths of a summer beechwood, some look in the girl's eyes, some note of tremulous and passionate sweetness, beyond her control, in her deep quiet voice, touched something irrepressible in him, and he turned to her with a face of intense, almost hungry yearning, and caught her hands—'Dear—dearest Beryl, could you—?'

The words broke off, but her eyes spoke in reply to his, and her sudden whiteness. He drew her to him, and folded her close.

'I don't think I ought'—the faltering, broken voice startled her—'I don't know whether I can make you happy. Dear, dear little Beryl!'

At that she put up her mouth instinctively, only to shrink back under the energy of his kiss. Then they had walked on together, hand in hand; but she remembered that, even before they left the wood, something seemed to have dimmed the extraordinary bliss of the first moment—some restlessness in him—some touch of absent-mindedness, as though he grudged himself his own happiness.

And so it had been ever since. He had resumed his work at Aldershot, and owing to certain consequences of the wound in 1915 was not likely, in spite of desperate efforts on his own part, to be sent back to the front. His letters varied just as his presence did. Something always seemed to be kept back from her—was always beyond her reach. Sometimes she supposed she was not clever enough, that he found her inadequate and irresponsive. Sometimes, with a sudden, half-guilty sense of disloyalty to him, she vaguely wondered whether there was some secret in his life—some past of which she knew nothing. How could there be? A man of stainless and brilliant reputation—modest, able, foolhardily brave, of whom all men spoke warmly; of a sensitive refinement too, which made it impossible to think of any ordinary vulgar skeleton in the background of his life.

Yet her misgivings had grown and grown upon her, till now they were morbidly strong. She did not satisfy him; she was not making him happy; it would be better for her to set him free. This action of his father's offered the opportunity. But as she thought of doing it—how she would do it, and how he might possibly accept it—she was torn with misery.

She and her girl-friend Pamela were very different. She was the elder by a couple of years, and much more mature. But Pamela's undeveloped powers, the flashes of daring, of romance, in the awkward reserved girl, the suggestion in her of a big and splendid flowering, fascinated Beryl, and in her humility she never dreamt that she, with her delicate pensiveness, the mingled subtlety and purity of her nature, was no less exceptional. She had been brought up very much alone. Her mother was no companion for her, and the brother nearest her own age and nearest her heart had been killed at the opening of the war. Arthur and she were very good friends, but not altogether congenial. She was rather afraid of him—of his critical temper, and his abrupt intolerant way, with people or opinions he disliked. Beryl was quite aware of his effect on Pamela Mannering, and it made her anxious. For she saw little chance for Pamela. Before the war, Arthur in London had been very much sought after, in a world where women are generally good-looking, and skilled besides in all the arts of pursuit. His standards were ridiculously high. His women friends were many and of the best. Why should he be attracted by anything so young and immature as Pamela?

At last! A pony-cart coming up from the lodge, with two figures in it—Aubrey and Pamela. So poor Pam had at last got hold of something in the nature of an animal!

Beryl gripped the balustrading which bordered one side of the path, and stood watching intently—a slender creature, in a broad purple hat, shading her small, distinguished face.

Presently, as the visitors approached the house, she waved to them, and they to her. They disappeared from view for a minute. Then a man's figure emerged alone from a garden door opening on the flagged path.

He came towards her with outstretched hands, looked round him smiling to see that no one was in sight, and then kissed her. Beryl knew she ought to have resisted the kiss; she had meant to do it; but all the same she submitted.

'Your father met us at the door. Arthur has carried Pamela off somewhere. Very sporting of them, wasn't it? So I've got you alone! How nice you look! And what a jolly place this is!'

He first looked her up and down with admiring eyes, and then made a gesture towards the beautiful modern house, and the equally beautiful and modern gardens in which it stood, with their still unspoilt autumn flowers, their cunning devices in steps and fountains and pergolas.

'How on earth do you keep it so trim?' He put a hand through her arm, and drew her on towards the wood-walk which opened beyond the formal garden and the lawn.

'With two or three old men, and two girls from the village,' said Beryl. 'Father doesn't mind what he gives up so long as it isn't the garden.'

'It's his pet vice!' laughed Aubrey—'his public-house, like my father's Greek pots. I say—you've heard of the secretary?'

It seemed to Beryl that he was fencing with her—delaying their real talk. But she accepted his lead.

'Yes, Desmond seems to like her. I don't gather that Pamela cares very much about her.'

'Oh, Pamela takes time. But what do you think the secretary did last night?'

'What?' They had paused under a group of limes clad in a glory of yellow leaf, and she was looking up in surprise at the unusual animation playing over the features of the man beside her.

'She refused to sign a codicil to my father's will, disinheriting me, and came to tell me so this morning! You should have heard her! Very formal and ceremonious—very much on her dignity! But such a brick!'

Mannering's deep-set eyes under his lined thinker's brow shone with amusement. Beryl, with the instinctive jealousy of a girl in love, was conscious of a sudden annoyance that Miss Bremerton should have been mixed up in Aubrey's personal affairs.

'What do you mean?'

Aubrey put an arm round her shoulder. She knew she ought to shake it off, but the pressure of it was too welcome. They strolled on.

'I had my talk with father last night. I told him he was absurd, and I was my own master. That you were perfectly free to give me up—that I had begged you to consider it—but I didn't think you would,' he smiled down upon her, but more gravely; 'and failing dismissal from you, we should be married as soon as it was reasonably possible. Was that right, darling?'

She evaded the question.

'Well—and then?'

'Then he broke out. Sir Henry of course was the bête noire. You can imagine the kind of things he said, I needn't repeat them. He is in a mood of perfectly mad opposition to all this war legislation, and it is not the least good arguing with him. Finally he told me that my allowance would be stopped, and Mannering would be left to Desmond, if we married. "All right!" I said, "I daresay, if he and I survive you, Desmond will let me look round sometimes." Not very respectful, perhaps, but by that time I was fed up. So then I wished him good-night, and went back to the drawing-room. In a few minutes he sent for Miss Bremerton—nobody knew why. I was dog-tired, and went to bed, and didn't I sleep!—nine good hours. Then this morning, just after breakfast, when I was strolling in the garden with a cigarette waiting for Pamela, who should come out but Miss Bremerton! Have you seen her?'

'Only in the distance.'

'Well, she's really a very fine creature, not pretty exactly—oh, not pretty at all—but wonderfully well set up, with beautiful hair, and a general look of—what shall I say?—dignity, refinement, knowing her own mind. You feel she would set you down in a moment if you took the smallest liberty. I could not think what she wanted. But she came up to me—of course we had made acquaintance the night before—"May I speak to you, Major Mannering? I wish to say something private. Shall we walk down to the kitchen garden?" So we walked down to the kitchen garden, and then she told me what had happened after dinner, when my father sent for her. She told it very stiffly, rather curtly in fact, as though she were annoyed to have to bother about such unprofessional things, and hated to waste her time. "But I don't wish, I don't intend," she said, "to have the smallest responsibility in the matter. So after thinking it over, I decided to inform you—and Mr. Desmond too, if you will kindly tell him—as to what I had done. That is all I have to say," with her chin very much in the air! "I did it, of course, because I did not care to be mixed up in any private or family affairs. That is not my business." I was taken aback, as you can imagine! But, of course, I thanked her—'

'Why, she couldn't have done anything else!' said Beryl with vivacity.

'I don't know that. Anybody may witness anything. But she seems to have guessed. Of course my father never keeps anything to himself. Anyway she didn't like being thanked at all. She turned back to the house at once. So then I asked her if she knew what had happened to the precious codicil. And she flushed up and said, with the manner of an icicle, "Mr. Mannering sent me to the drawer this morning, where he had put it away. It was lying on the top, and I saw it." "Signed?" I said. "No, not signed." Then she began to hurry, and I thought I had offended her in some way. But it dawned upon me, presently, that she was really torn between her feeling of chivalry towards me—she seems to have a kindness for soldiers! her brother is fighting somewhere—and her professional obligations towards my father. Wasn't it odd? She hated to be indiscreet, to give him away, and yet she could not help it! I believe she had been awake half the night. Her eyes looked like it. I must say I liked her very much. A woman of a great deal of character! I expect she has a rough time of it!'

'But of course,' said Beryl, 'it may be all signed and witnessed by now!'

'Most probably!' The Major laughed. 'But she did her best anyway, and I shan't ask her any more questions. We had better take it for granted. My father is as obstinate as they make 'em. Well now, dear Beryl, have you—have you thought it over?'

He pointed to a seat, and sat down by her. The brightness of his look had passed away. The thin, intellectual face and lined brow had resumed the expression that was familiar to Beryl. It was an expression of fatigue—not physical now, for he had clearly recovered his health, but moral; as though the man behind it were worn out by some hidden debate with his own mind, into which he fell perpetually, when left to himself. It was the look which divided him from her.

'Yes,' she said slowly, 'I've been thinking a great deal.' She stopped; then lifting her eyes, which were grey and fringed with dark lashes—beautiful eyes, timid yet passionately honest—she said, 'You'd better give me up, Aubrey!'

He made a restless movement, then took her hands and raised them to his lips.

'I don't feel like it!' he said, smiling. 'Tell me what you mean.'

She looked down, plucking at the fringed belt of her sports coat. Her lips trembled a little.

'I don't think, Aubrey, I can make you happy! I've been feeling often—that I don't seem to make much difference to you. And now this is very serious—giving up Mannering. You may mind it much more than you think. And if—'

'If what? Go on!'

She raised her eyes again and looked at him straight.

'If I can't make up?'

The colour flooded into his face, as though, far within, something stirred 'like a guilty thing surprised.' But he said tenderly:

'I don't care that, Beryl'—he snapped his fingers—'for Mannering in comparison with you.'

Her breath fluttered a little, but she went on resolutely. 'But I must say it—I must tell you what I feel. It seems the right opportunity. So often, Aubrey, I don't seem to understand you! I say the wrong thing. I'm not clever. I haven't any deep thoughts—like you or Arthur. It would be terrible if you married me, and then—I felt you were disappointed.'

He moved a little away from her and, propping his chin on his hands, looked gravely through the thinning branches of the wood.

'I wonder why you say that—I wonder what I've done!'

'Oh, you've done nothing!' cried Beryl. 'It's only I feel—sometimes—that—that you don't let me know things—share things. You seem sometimes so sad—and I can't be any help—you won't let me! That's what I mind so much—so dreadfully!'

He was silent a moment. Then without any attempt at caresses, he said, 'I wonder, Beryl, whether you—whether you—ever realize—what we soldiers have seen? No!—thank God!—you don't—you can't.'

She pressed her hands to her eyes, and shuddered.

'No, of course I can't—of course I can't!' she said passionately.

Then, while her eyes were still hidden, there passed through his worn features a sharp spasm, as of some uncontrollable anguish—passed and was gone.

He turned towards her, and she looked up. If ever love, all-giving, self-forgetting, was written on a girl's face, it was written on Beryl's then. Her wild-rose colour came and went; her eyes were full of tears. She had honestly made her attempt, but she could not carry it through, and he saw it. Some vague hope—of which he was ashamed—died away. Profoundly touched, he put out his arms, and making nothing of her slight resistance, gathered her close to him.

'Did you ever read Sintram, Beryl?'

'Yes, years ago.'

'Do you remember his black fits—how they came upon him unexpectedly—and only Verena could help him? It's like that with me sometimes. Things I've seen—horrible sufferings and death—come back on me. I can't get over it—at least not yet. But I'll never let it come really between us. And perhaps—some day'—he hesitated and his voice dropped—'you shall help me—like Verena!'

She clung to him, not knowing what he meant, but fascinated by his deep voice, and the warm shelter of his arms. He bent down to kiss her, in the most passionate embrace he had ever given her.

Then he released her, and they both looked at each other with a new shyness.

'So that's all right!' he said, smiling. 'You see you can't drop me as easily as you think. I stick! Well, now, you take me as a pauper—not exactly a pauper—but still—I've got to settle things with your father, though!'

Beryl proposed that they should go and look for the others.

They went hand in hand.

Sir Henry meanwhile was engaged in the congenial occupation of inspecting and showing his kitchen gardens. His son Arthur and Pamela Mannering were following him round the greenhouses, finding more amusement in the perplexities of Sir Henry's conscience than interest in the show itself.

'You see they've brought in the chrysanthemums. Just in time! There was a frost last night,' said Sir Henry, throwing open a door, and disclosing a greenhouse packed with chrysanthemums in bud.

'My hat—what a show!' said his son.

'Not at all, Arthur, not at all,' said his father, annoyed. 'Not a third of what we had last year.'

Arthur raised his eyebrows, and behind his father's back he and Pamela exchanged smiles. The next house showed a couple of elderly men at work pruning roses intended to flower in February and March.

'This is almost my favourite house,' exclaimed Sir Henry. 'Such a wonderful result for so little labour!' He strolled on complacently.

'How long does this take you, Grimes?' Arthur inquired discreetly of one of the gardeners.

'Oh, a good while, Mr. Arthur—what with the pruning, and the syringing, and the manuring,' said the man addressed, stopping to wipe his brow, for the day was mild.

Arthur's look darkened a little. He fell into a reverie, while Pamela was conscious at every step of his tall commanding presence, of the Military Cross on his khaki breast, and the pleasant, penetrating eyes under his staff cap. Arthur, she thought, must be now over thirty. Before his recent wound he had been doing some special artillery work on the Staff of an Army Corps, and was a very rising soldier. He was now chafing hotly against the ruling of his Medical Board, who were insisting that he was not yet fit to go back to France.

Pamela meanwhile was going through moments of disillusion. After these two years she had looked forward to the meeting with such eagerness, such hidden emotion! And now—what was there to have been eager about? They seemed to be talking almost as strangers. The soreness of it bewildered her.

Presently, as they were walking back to the house, leaving Sir Henry in anxious consultation over the mushroom-house with the grey-haired head gardener, her companion turned to her abruptly.

'I suppose that's all right!' He pointed to some distant figures on the fringe of a wood.

'Beryl and Aubrey? Yes—if Aubrey can make her see that she isn't doing him any harm by letting him go on.'

'Good heavens! how could she do him any harm?'

'Well, there's Mannering. As if that mattered!' said the girl scornfully. 'And then—Beryl's too dreadfully humble!'

'Humble! About what? No girl ought to be humble—ever!'

Pamela's eyes recovered their natural brilliance under his peremptory look. And he, who had begun the walk with no particular consciousness at all about his companion, except that she was a nice, good-looking child, whom he had known from a baby, with equal suddenness became aware of her in a new way.

'Why shouldn't we be humble, please?' she said, with a laugh.

'Because it's monstrous that you should. Leave that to us!'

'There wouldn't be much of it about, if we did!' The red danced in her cheek.

'Much humility? Oh, you're quite mistaken. Men are much more humble than you think. But we're human, of course. If you tempt us, you soon put the starch into us.'

'Well, you must starch Beryl!' said Pamela, with emphasis. 'She will think and say that she's not worthy of Aubrey, that she knows she'll disappoint him, that she wouldn't mind his giving up Mannering if only she were sure she could make him happy—and heaps of things like that! I'm sure she's saying them now!'

'I never heard such nonsense in my life!' The masculine face beside her was all impatience. 'One can't exactly boast about one's sister, but you and I know very well what Beryl is worth!'

Pamela agreed fervently. 'Besides, Desmond would give it back.'

'Hm—' her companion demurred. 'Giving back isn't always easy. As to pounds, shillings, and pence, if one must talk of them, it's lucky that Beryl has her "bit." But I shouldn't wonder if your father thought better of it after all.'

Pamela flushed indignantly.

'He all but signed a codicil to his will last night! He's in a tearing hurry about it. He called in Miss Bremerton and wanted her to witness it. And she refused. So father threw it into a drawer, and nobody knows what has happened.'

'Miss Bremerton? The new secretary?' The tone expressed both amusement and curiosity. 'Ah! I hear all sorts of interesting things about her.'

Pamela straightened her shoulders defiantly.

'Of course she's interesting. She's terribly clever and up to date, and all the rest of it. She's beginning to boss father, and very soon she'll boss all the rest of us.'

'Perhaps you wanted it!' said Captain Chicksands, smiling.

'Perhaps we did,' Pamela admitted. 'But one needn't like it all the same. Well, she's rationed us—that's one good thing—and father really doesn't guess! And now she's begun to take an interest in the farms! I believe she's walked over to the Holme Wood farm to-day, to see for herself what state it's in. Father's in town. And she's trying hard to keep father out of a horrible row with the County Committee.'

'About ploughing up the park?'

Pamela nodded.

'Plucky woman!' said Arthur Chicksands heartily. 'I'm sure you help her, Pamela, all you can?'

'I don't like being managed,' said the girl stubbornly, rather resenting his tone.

A slight shade of sternness crossed the soldier's face.

'You know it's no good playing with this war,' he said drily. 'It's as much to be won here as it is over seas. Food!—that'll be the last word for everybody. And it's women's work as much as men's.'

She saw that she had jarred on him. But an odd jealousy—or perhaps her hidden disappointment—drove her on.

'Yes, but one doesn't like strangers interfering,' she said childishly.

The soldier threw her a side-glance, while his lip twitched a little. So this was Pamela—grown-up. She seemed to him rather foolish—and very lovely. There was no doubt about that! She was going to be a beauty, and of a remarkable type. He himself was a strong, high-minded, capable fellow, with an instinctive interest in women, and a natural aptitude for making friends with them. He was inclined, always, to try and set them in the right way; to help them to some of the mental training which men got in a hundred ways, and women, as it seemed to him, were often so deplorably without. But this schoolmaster function only attracted him when there was opposition. He had been quite sincere in denouncing humility in women. It never failed to warn him off.

'Do you think she really wants to interfere?' he asked, smiling. 'I expect it's only that she's got a bit of an organizing gift—like the women who have been doing such fine things in the war.'

'There's no chance for me to do fine things in the war,' said Pamela bitterly.

'Take up the land, and see! Suppose you and Miss Bremerton could pull the estate together!'

Pamela's eyes scoffed.

'Father would never let me. No, I think sometimes I shall run away!'

He lifted his eyebrows, and she was annoyed with him for taking her remark as mere bluff.

'You'll see,' she insisted. 'I shall do something desperate.'

'I wouldn't,' he said, quietly. 'Make friends with Miss Bremerton and help her.'

'I don't like her enough,' she said, drawing quick breath.

He saw now she was in a mood to quarrel with him outright. But he didn't mean to let her. With those eyes—in such a fire—she was really splendid. How she had come on!

'I'm sorry,' he said mildly. 'Because, you know—if you don't mind my saying so—it'll really take the two of you to keep your father out of gaol. The Government's absolutely determined about this thing—they can't afford to be anything else. We're being hammered, and gassed, and blown to pieces over there'—he pointed eastward. 'It's the least the people over here can do—to play up—isn't it?' Then he laughed. 'But I mustn't be setting you against your father. I didn't mean to.'

Pamela shrugged her shoulders, in silence. She really longed to ask him about his wound, his staff work, a thousand things; but they didn't seem, somehow, to be intimate enough, to be hitting it off enough. This meeting, which had been to her a point of romance in the distance, was turning out to be just nothing—only disappointment. She was glad to see how quickly the other pair were coming towards them, and at the same time bitterly vexed that her tête-à-tête with Arthur was at an end.

[!-- H2 anchor --]

CHAPTER VI

Meanwhile Elizabeth Bremerton was sitting pensive on a hill-side about mid-way between Mannering and Chetworth. She had a bunch of autumn berries in her hands. Her tweed skirt and country boots showed traces of mud much deeper than anything on the high road; her dress was covered with bits of bramble, dead leaves, and thistledown; and her bright gold hair had been pulled here and there out of its neat coils, as though she had been pushing through hedges or groping through woods.

'It's perfectly monstrous!' she was thinking. 'It oughtn't to be allowed. And when we're properly civilized, it won't be allowed. No one ought to be free to ruin his land as he pleases! It concerns the State. "Manage your land decently—produce a proper amount of food—or out you go!" And I wouldn't have waited for war to say it! Ugh! that place!'

And she thought with disgust of the choked and derelict fields, the ruined gates and fences, the deserted buildings she had just been wandering through. After the death of an old miser, who, according to the tale she had heard in a neighbouring village, had lived there for forty years, with a decrepit wife, both of them horribly neglected and dirty, and making latterly no attempt to work the farm, a new tenant had appeared who would have taken the place, if the Squire would have rebuilt the house and steadings, and allowed a reasonable sum for the cleansing and recovering of the land. But the Squire would do nothing of the kind. He 'hadn't a farthing to spend on expensive repairs,' and if the new tenant wouldn't take the farm on the old terms, well, he might leave it alone.

The place had just been investigated by the County Committee, and a peremptory order had been issued. What was the Squire going to do?

Elizabeth fell to thinking what ought to be done with the Squire's twelve thousand acres, if the Squire were a reasonable man. It was exasperating to her practical sense to see a piece of business in such a muddle. As a child and growing girl she had spent long summers in the country with a Dorsetshire uncle who farmed his own land, and there had sprung up in her an instinctive sympathy with the rich old earth and its kindly powers, with the animals and the crops, with the labourers and their rural arts, with all the interwoven country life, and its deep rooting in the soil of history and poetry.

Country life is, above all, steeped in common sense—the old, ancestral, simple wisdom of primitive men. And Elizabeth, in spite of her classical degree, and her passion for Greek pots, believed herself to be, before everything, a person of common sense. She had always managed her own family's affairs. She had also been the paid secretary of an important learned society in her twenties not long after she left college, and knew well that she had been a conspicuous success. She had a great love, indeed, for any sort of organizing, large and small, for putting things straight, and running them. She was burning to put Mannering straight—and run it. She knew she could. Organizing means not doing things yourself, but finding the right people to do them. And she had always been good at finding the right people—putting the round pegs into the round holes.

All very well, however, to talk of running the Squire's estate! What was to be done with the Squire?

Take the codicil business. First thing that morning he had sent her to that very drawer to look for something, and there lay the precious document—unsigned and unwitnessed—for any one to see. He made no comment, nor of course did she. He would probably forget it till the date of his son's marriage was announced, and then complete it in a hurry.

Take the farms and the park. As to the farms there were two summonses now pending against him with regard to 'farms in hand'—Holme Wood and another—besides the action in the case of the three incompetent men, Gregson at their head, who were being turned out. With regard to ploughing up the park, all his attempts so far to put legal difficulties in the way of the County Committee had been quite futile. The steam plough was coming in a week. Meanwhile the gates were to be locked, and two old park-keepers, who were dithering in their shoes, had been told to defend them.

At bottom, Elizabeth was tolerably convinced that the Squire would not land himself in gaol, cut off from his books and his bronzes, and reduced to the company of people who had never heard of Pausanias. But she was alarmed lest he should 'try it on' a little too far, in these days when the needs of war and the revolutionary currents abroad make the setting down of squires especially agreeable to the plebeians who sit on juries or county committees. Of course he must—he certainly would—climb down.

But somebody would have to go through the process of persuading him! That was due to his silly dignity! She supposed that somebody would be herself. How absurd! She, who had just been six weeks on the scene! But neither of the married daughters had the smallest influence with him; Sir Henry Chicksands had been sent about his business; Major Mannering was out of favour, and Desmond and Pamela were but babes.

Then a recollection flashed across the contriving mind of Elizabeth which brought a decided flush to her fair skin—a flush which was half amusement, half wrath. That morning a rather curious incident had happened. After her talk with Major Mannering, and because the morning was fine and the Squire was away, she had dragged a small table out into the garden, in front of the library, and set to work there on a part of the new catalogue of the collections, which she and Mr. Levasseur were making. She did not, however, like Mr. Levasseur. Something in her, indeed, disapproved of him strongly. She had already managed to dislodge him a good deal from his former intimacy with the Squire. Luckily she was a much better scholar than he, though she admitted that his artistic judgment was worth having.

As a shelter from a rather cold north wind, she was sitting in full sun under the protection of a yew hedge of ancient growth, which ran out at right angles to the library, and made one side of a quadrangular rose-garden, planted by Mrs. Mannering long ago, and now, like everything else, in confusion and neglect.

Presently she heard voices on the other side of the hedge—Mrs. Strang, no doubt, and Mrs. Gaddesden. She did not take much to either lady. Mrs. Strang seemed to her full of good intentions, but without practical ability to fit them. For Mrs. Gaddesden's type she had an instinctive contempt, the contempt of the clever woman of small means who has had to earn her own living, and to watch in silence the poses and pretences of rich women playing at philanthropy. But, all the same, she and the servants between them had made Mrs. Gaddesden extremely comfortable, while at the same time rationing her strictly. 'I really can be civil to anybody!' thought Elizabeth complacently.

Suddenly, her own name, and a rush of remarks on the other side of this impenetrable hedge, made her raise her head, startled, from her work, eyes and mouth wide open.

It was Mrs. Gaddesden speaking.

'Yes, she's gone out. I went into the library just now to ask her to look out a train for me. She's wonderfully good at Bradshaw. Oh, of course, I admit she's a very clever woman! But she wasn't there. Forest thinks she's gone over to Holme Wood, to get father some information he wants. She asked Forest how to get this this morning. My dear Margaret,' with great emphasis, 'there's no question about it! If she chooses, she'll be mistress here before long. She's steadily getting father into her hands. She was never engaged, was she, to look after accounts and farms? and yet here she is, taking everything on. He'll grow more and more dependent upon her, and you'll see!—I believe he's been inclined for some time to marry again. He wants somebody to look after Pamela, and set him free for his hobbies. He'll very soon find out that this woman fills the part, and that, if he marries her, he'll get a classical secretary besides.'

Mrs. Strang's voice—a deep husky voice—interposed.

'Miss Bremerton's not a woman to be married against her will, that you may be sure of, Alice.'

'No, but, my dear,' said the other impatiently, 'every woman over thirty wants a home—and a husband. She'd get that here anyway, however bad father's affairs may be. And, of course, a position.'

The voices passed on out of hearing. Elizabeth remained transfixed. Then with a contemptuous shake of the head, and a bright colour, she returned to her work.

But now, as she sat meditating on the hill-side, this absurd conversation recurred to her. Absurd, and not absurd! 'Most women of my sort can do what they have a mind to do,' she thought to herself, with perfect sang-froid. 'If I thought it worth while to marry this elderly lunatic—he's an interesting lunatic, though!—I suppose I could do it. But it isn't worth while—not the least. I've done with being a woman! What interests me is the bit of work—national work! Men find that kind of thing enough—a great many of them. I mean to find it enough. A fig for marrying!'

All the same, as she returned to her schemes both for regenerating the estate and managing the Squire—schemes which were beginning to fascinate her, both by their difficulty and their scale—she found her thoughts oddly interfered with, first by recollections of the past—bitter, ineffaceable memories—and then by reflections on the recent course of her relations with the Squire.

He had greeted her that morning without a single reference to the incidents of the night before, had seemed in excellent spirits, and before going up to town had given her in twenty minutes, à propos of some difficulty in her work, one of the most brilliant lectures on certain points of Homeric archaeology she had ever heard—and she was a connoisseur in lectures.

Intellectually, as a scholar, she both admired and looked upon him—with reverence, even with enthusiasm. She was eager for his praise, distressed by his censure. Practically and morally, patriotically, above all, she despised him, thought him 'a worm and no man'! There was the paradox of the situation and as full of tingling challenge and entertainment as paradoxes generally are.

At this point she became aware of a group on the high road far to her right. A pony-cart—a girl driving it—a man in khaki beside her; with a second girl-figure and another khaki-clad warrior, walking near.

She presently thought she recognized Pamela's pony and Pamela herself. Desmond, who was going off that very evening to his artillery camp, had told her that 'Pam' was driving Aubrey over to Chetworth, and that he, Desmond, was 'jolly well going to see to it that neither old Aubrey nor Beryl were bullied out of their lives by father,' if he could help it. So no doubt the second girl-figure was that of Beryl Chicksands, and the other gentleman in khaki was probably Captain Chicksands, for whom Desmond seemed to cherish a boyish hero-worship. They had been all lunching together at Chetworth, she supposed.

She watched them coming, with a curious mingling of interest in them and detachment from them. She was to them merely the Squire's paid secretary. Were they anything to her? A puckish thought crossed her mind, sending a flash of slightly cynical laughter through her quiet eyes. If Mrs. Gaddesden's terrors—for she supposed they were terrors—were suddenly translated into fact, why, all these people would become in a moment related to her!—their lives would be mixed up with hers—she and they would matter intimately to each other!

She sat smiling and dreaming a few more minutes, the dimples playing about her firm mouth and chin. Then, as the sound of wheels drew nearer, she rose and went towards the party.

The party from Chetworth soon perceived Elizabeth's approach. 'So this is the learned lady?' said the Captain in Pamela's ear. She had brought him in her pony-carriage so far, as he was not yet able for much physical exertion, and he and Beryl were to walk back from Holme Wood Hill.

He put up his eye-glass, and examined the figure as it came nearer.

'She's just come up, I suppose, from the farm,' said Pamela, pointing to some red roofs among the trees, in the wide hollow below the hill.

'"Athêne Ageleiê"!' murmured the Major, who had been proxime for the Ireland, and a Balliol man. 'She holds herself well—beautiful hair!'

'Beryl, this is Miss Bremerton,' said Aubrey Mannering, with a cordial ring in his voice, as he introduced his fiancée to Elizabeth. The two shook hands, and Elizabeth thought the girl's manner a little stand-off, and wondered why.

The pony had soon been tied up, and the party spread themselves on the grass of the hill-side; for Holme Wood Hill was a famous point of view, and the sunny peace of the afternoon invited loitering. For miles to the eastward spread an undulating chalk plain, its pale grey or purplish soil showing in the arable fields where the stubbles were just in process of ploughing, its monotony broken by a vast wood of oak and beech into which the hill-side ran down—a wood of historic fame, which had been there when Senlac was fought, had furnished ship-timber for the Armada, and sheltered many a cavalier fugitive of the Civil Wars.

The wood indeed, which belonged to the Squire, was a fragment of things primeval. For generations the trees in it had sprung up, flourished, and fallen as they pleased. There were corners of it where the north-west wind sweeping over the bare down above it had made pathways of death and ruin; sinister places where the fallen or broken trunks of the great beech trees, as they had crashed down-hill upon and against each other, had assumed all sorts of grotesque and phantasmal attitudes, as in a trampled mêlée of giants; there were other parts where slender plumed trees, rising branchless to a great height above open spaces, took the shape from a distance of Italian stone palms, and gave a touch of southern or romantic grace to the English midland scene; while at their feet, the tops of the more crowded sections of the wood lay in close, billowy masses of leaf, the oaks vividly green, the beeches already aflame.

'Who says there's a war?' said Captain Chicksands, sinking luxuriously into a sunny bed of dry leaves, conveniently placed in front of Elizabeth. 'Miss Bremerton, you and I were, I understand, at the same University?'

Elizabeth assented.

'Is it your opinion that Universities are any good?—that after the war there are going to be any Universities?'

'Only those that please the Labour Party!' put in Mannering.

'Oh, I'm not afraid of the Labour Party—awfully good fellows, many of them. The sooner they make a Government the better. They've got to learn their lessons like the rest of us. But I do want to know whether Miss Bremerton thinks Oxford was any use—before the war—and is going to be any use after the war? It's all right now, of course, for the moment, with the Colleges full of cadets and wounded men. But would you put the old Oxford back if you could?'

He lay on his elbows looking up at her. Elizabeth's eyes sparkled a little. She realized that an able man was experimenting on her, putting her through her paces. She asked what he meant by 'the old Oxford,' and an amusing dialogue sprang up between them as to their respective recollections of the great University—the dons, the lectures, the games, the Eights, 'Commem.' and the like. The Captain presently declared that Elizabeth had had a much nicer Oxford than he, and he wished he had been a female student.

'Didn't you—didn't you,' he said, his keen eyes observing her, 'get a prize once that somebody had given to the Women's Colleges for some Greek iambics?'

'Oh,' cried Elizabeth, 'how did you hear of that?'

'I was rather a dab at them myself,' he said lazily, drawing his hat over his eyes as he lay in the sun, 'and I perfectly remember hearing of a young lady—yes, I believe it was you!—whose translation of Browning's "Lost Leader" into Greek iambics was better than mine. They set it in the Ireland. You admit it? Capital! As to the superiority of yours, I was, of course, entirely sceptical, though polite. Remind me, how did you translate "Just for a ribbon to put on his coat"?'

With a laughing mouth, Elizabeth at once quoted the Greek.

The Captain made a wry face.

'It sounds plausible, I agree,' he said slowly, 'but I don't believe a Greek would have understood a word of it. You remember that in the dim Victorian ages, when one great Latin scholar gave, as he thought, the neatest possible translation of "The path of glory leads but to the grave," another great Latin scholar declared that all a Roman could have understood by it would have been "The path of a public office leads to the jaws of the hillock"?'

The old Oxford joke was new in the ears of this Georgian generation, and when the laugh subsided, Elizabeth said mildly:

'Now, please, may I have yours?'

'What—my translation? Oh—horribly unfair!' said the Captain, chewing a piece of grass. 'However, here it is!'

He gave it out—with unction.

Elizabeth fell upon it in a flash, dissected and quarrelled with every word of it, turned it inside out in fact, while the Captain, still chewing, followed her with eyes of growing enjoyment.

'Well, I'll take a vote when I get back to the front,' he said, when she came to an end. 'Several firsts in Mods on our staff. I'll send you the result.'

The talk dropped. The mention of the front reminded every one of the war, and its bearing on their own personal lot. Desmond was going into camp that evening. In a few months he would be a full-blown gunner at the front. Beryl, watching Aubrey's thin face and nervous frown, proved inwardly that the Aldershot appointment might go on. And Elizabeth's thoughts had flown to her brother in Mesopotamia.

Pamela, sitting apart, and deeply shaded by a great beech with drooping branches that rose behind the group, was sharply unhappy, and filled with a burning jealousy of Elizabeth, who queened it there in the middle of them—so self-possessed, agreeable, and competent. How well Arthur had been getting on with her! What a tiresome, tactless idiot she, Pamela, must seem in comparison! The memory of her talk with him made her cheeks hot. So few chances of seeing him!—and when they came, she threw them away. She felt for the moment as though she hated Elizabeth. Why had her father saddled her upon them? Life was difficult enough before. Passionately she began to think of her threat to Arthur. It had been the merest 'idle word.' But why shouldn't she realize it—why not 'run away'? There was work to be done, and money to be earned, by any able-bodied girl. And perhaps then, when she was on her own, and had proved that she was not a child any longer, Arthur would respect her more, take more interest in her.

'What do you prophesy?' said Elizabeth suddenly, addressing Arthur Chicksands, who seemed to be asleep in the grass. 'Will it end—by next summer?'

'What, the war?' he said, waking up. 'Oh dear, no. Next year will be the worst of any—the test of us all—especially of you civilians at home. If we stick it, we shall save ourselves and the world. If we don't—'

He shrugged his shoulders. His voice was full and deep. It thrilled the girl sitting in the shade—partly with fear. In three weeks or so, the speaker would be back in the full inferno of the front, and because of her father's behaviour she would probably not be able to see him in the interval. Perhaps she might never see him again. Perhaps this was the last time. And he would go away without giving her a thought. Whereas, if she had played her cards differently, this one last day, he might at least have asked her to write to him. Many men did—even with girls they hardly knew at all.

Just then she noticed a movement of Beryl's, and saw her friend's small bare hand creep out and slip itself into Aubrey Mannering's, as he sat beside her on the grass. The man's hand enfolded the girl's—he turned round to smile at her in silence. A pang of passionate envy swept through Pamela. It was just so she wished to be enfolded—to be loved.

It was Elizabeth—as the person who had business to do and hours to keep—who gave the signal for the break-up of the party. She sprang to her feet, with a light, decided movement, and all the others fell into line. Arthur and Beryl still accompanied the Mannering contingent a short distance, the Captain walking beside Elizabeth in animated conversation. At last Beryl peremptorily recalled him to the pony-carriage, and the group halted for good-byes.

Pamela stood rather stiffly apart. The Captain went up to her.

'Good-bye, Pamela. Do write to me sometimes! I shall be awfully interested about the farms!'

With vexation she felt the colour rush to her cheeks.

'I shan't have much to say about them,' she said stiffly.

'I'm sure you will! You'll get keen! But write about anything. It's awfully jolly to get letters at the front!'

His friendly, interrogating eyes were on her, as though she puzzled him in this new phase, and he wanted to understand her. She said hurriedly, 'If you like,' hating herself for the coolness in her voice, and shook hands, only to hear him say, as he turned finally to Elizabeth, 'Mind, you have promised me "The Battle of the Plough"! I'm afraid you'll hardly have time to put it into iambics!'

So he had asked Miss Bremerton to write to him too! Pamela vowed inwardly that in that case she would not write him a line. And it seemed to her unseemly that her father's secretary should be making mock of her father's proceedings with a man who was a complete stranger to her. She walked impetuously ahead of Aubrey and Elizabeth. Towards the west the beautiful day was dying, and the light streamed on the girl's lithe young figure and caught her golden-brown hair. Clouds of gnats rose in the mild air; and a light seemed to come back from the bronzed and purple hedgerows, making a gorgeous atmosphere, in which the quiet hill-top and the thinning trees swam transfigured. A green woodpecker was pecking industriously among some hedgerow oaks, and Pamela, who loved birds and watched them, caught every now and then the glitter of his flight. The world was dropping towards sleep. But she was burningly awake and alive. Had she ever been really alive before?

Then—suddenly she remembered Desmond. He was to be home from some farewell visits between five and six. She would be late; he might want her for a hundred things. His last evening! Her heart smote her. They had reached the park gates. Waving her hand to the two behind, with the one word 'Desmond!' she began to run, and was soon out of their sight.

Elizabeth and Aubrey were not long behind her. They found the house indeed pervaded with Desmond, and Desmond's going. Aubrey also was going up to town, but of him nobody took any notice. Pamela and Forest were in attendance on the young warrior, who was himself in the wildest spirits, shouting and whistling up and downstairs, singing the newest and most shocking of camp songs, chaffing Forest, and looking with mischievous eyes at the various knitted 'comforts' to which his married sisters were hastily putting the last stitches.

'I say, Pam—do you see me in mittens?' he said to her in the hall, thrusting out his two splendid hands with a grin. 'And as for that jersey of Alice's—why, I should stew to death in it. Oh, I know—I can give it to my batman. The fellows tell me you can always get rid of things to your batman. It's like sending your wedding-presents to the pawn-shop. But where is father?' The boy looked discontentedly at his watch. 'He vowed he'd be here by five. I must be off by a few minutes after eight.'

'The train's late. He'll be here directly,' said Pamela confidently; 'and I say—don't you hurt Alice's feelings, old man.'

'Don't you preach, Pam!' said the boy, laughing. And a few minutes afterwards Pamela, passing the open door of the drawing-room, heard him handsomely thanking his elder sisters. He ran into her as he emerged with his arms full of scarves, mittens, and the famous jersey which had taken Alice Gaddesden a year to knit.

'Stuff 'em in somewhere, Pam!' he said in her ear. 'They can go up to London anyway.' And having shovelled them all off on to her, he raced along the passage to the library in search of Elizabeth.

'I say, Miss Bremerton, I want a book or two.'

Elizabeth looked up smiling from her table. She was already of the same mind as everybody outside and inside Mannering—that Desmond did you a kindness when he asked you to do him one.

'What kind of a book?'

'Oh, I've got some novels, and some Nat Goulds, and Pamela's given me some war-books. Don't know if I shall read 'em!—Well, I'd like a small Horace, if you can find one. "My tutor" was an awfully good hand at Horace. He really did make me like the old chap! And have you got such a thing as a Greek Anthology that wouldn't take up much room?'

Elizabeth went to the shelves to look. Desmond as the possessor of literary tastes was a novelty to her. But, after all, she understood that he had been a half in the Sixth at Eton, before his cadet training began. She found him two small pocket editions, and the boy thanked her gratefully. He began to turn over the Anthology, as though searching for something.

'Can I help you to find anything?' she asked him.

'No—it's something I remember,' he said absently, and presently hit upon it, with a look of pleasure.

'They did know a thing or two, didn't they? That's fine anyway?' He handed her the book. 'But I forget some of the words. Do you mind giving me a construe?' he said humbly.

Elizabeth translated, feeling rather choky.

'"On the Spartans at Thermopylæ.

'"Him—"'

'That's Xerxes, of course,' put in Desmond.

'"Him, who changed the paths of earth and sea, who sailed upon the mainland, and walked upon the deep—him did Spartan valour hold back, with just three hundred spears. Shame on you, mountains and seas!"'

'Well, that's all right, isn't it?' said the boy simply, looking up. 'Couldn't put it better if you tried, could you?' Then he said, hesitating a little as he turned down the leaf, and put the book in his pocket, 'Five of the fellows who were in the Sixth with me this time last year are dead by now. It makes you think a bit, doesn't it?—Hullo, there is father!'

He turned joyously, his young figure finely caught in the light of Elizabeth's lamp against the background of the Nikê.

'Well, father you have been a time! I thought you'd forgotten altogether I was off to-night.'

'The train was abominably late. Travelling is becoming a perfect nuisance! I gave the station-master a piece of my mind,' said the Squire angrily.

'And I expect he said that you civilians jolly well have to wait for the munition trains!'

'He muttered some nonsense of that sort. I didn't listen to him.' The Squire threw himself down in an arm-chair. Desmond perched on the corner of a table near. Elizabeth discreetly took up her work and disappeared.

'How much time have you got?' asked the Squire abruptly.

'Oh, a few minutes. Aubrey and I are to have some supper before I go. But Forest'll come and tell me.'

'Everything ready? Got money enough?'

'Rather! I shan't want anything for an age. Why, I shall be buying war-loan out of my pay!'

He laughed happily. Then his face grew suddenly serious.

'Look here, father—I want awfully to say something. Do you mind?'

'If you want to say it, I suppose you will say it.'

The Squire was sitting hunched up, looking old and tired, his thick white hair piled fantastically above his eyes.

Desmond straightened his shoulders with the air of one going over the parapet.

'Well, it's this, father. I do wish you'd give up that row about the park!'

The Squire sat up impatiently.

'That's not your business, Desmond. It can't matter to you.'

'Yes, but it does matter to me!' said the boy with energy. 'It'll be in all the papers—the fellows will gas about it at mess—it's awfully hard lines on me. It makes me feel rotten!'

The Squire laughed. He was reminded of a Fourth of June years before, when Desmond had gone through agonies of shame because his father was not, in his eyes, properly 'got-up' for the occasion—how he had disappeared in the High Street, and only joined his people again in the crowd at the fireworks.

'I recommend you to stick it, Desmond. It won't last long. I've got my part to play, and you've got yours. You fight because they make you.'

'I don't!' said the boy passionately. 'I fight because—'

Then his words broke down. He descended from the table.

'Well, all right, father. I suppose it's no good talking. Only if you think I shan't mind if you get yourself put in quad, you're jolly well mistaken. Hullo, Forest! I'm coming!'

He hurried off, the Squire moving slowly after him. In the hour before the boy departed he was the spoilt darling of his sisters and the servants, who hung round him, and could not do enough for him. He endured it, on the whole, patiently dashing out at the very end to say good-bye to an old gardener, once a keeper, with whom he used to go ferreting in the park. To his father alone his manner was not quite as usual. It was the manner of one who had been hurt. The Squire felt it.

As to his elder son, he and Aubrey parted without any outward sign of discord, and on the way to London Aubrey, with the dry detachment that was natural to him in speaking of himself, told the story of the preceding twenty-four hours to the eager Desmond's sympathetic ears. 'Well done, Broomie!' was the boy's exultant comment on the tale of the codicil.

The house after Desmond's departure settled dreamily down. Pamela, with red eyes, retreated to the schoolroom, and began to clear up the debris left by the packing; Alice Gaddesden went to sleep in the drawing-room; Mrs. Strang wrote urgent letters to registry offices, who now seldom answered her; the Squire was in the library, and Elizabeth retreated early to her own room. She spent a good deal of time in writing up a locked diary, and finishing up a letter to her mother. Then she saw to her astonishment that it was nearly one o'clock, and began to feel sleepy.

The night was warm, and before undressing she put out her light, and threw up her window. There was a moon nearly at the full outside, and across the misty stretches of the park the owls were calling.

Suddenly she heard a distant footstep, and drew back from the window. A man was pacing slowly up and down an avenue of pollarded limes which divided the rose-garden from the park. His figure could only be intermittently seen; but it was certainly the Squire.

She drew the curtains again without shutting the window; and for long after she was in bed she still heard the footstep. It awakened many trains of thought in her—of her own position in this household where she seemed to have become already mistress and indispensable; of Desmond's last words with her; of the relations between father and son; of Captain Chicksands and his most agreeable company; of Pamela's evident dislike of her, and what she could do to mend it.

As to Pamela, Elizabeth's thoughts went oddly astray. She was vexed with the girl for what had seemed to the elder woman her young rudeness to a gallant and distinguished man. Why, she had scarcely spoken a word to him during the sitting on the hill! In some way, Elizabeth supposed, Captain Chicksands had offended her—had not made enough of her perhaps? But girls must learn now to accept simpler and blunter manners from their men friends. She guessed that Pamela was in that self-conscious, exalté mood of first youth which she remembered so well in herself—fretting too, no doubt, poor child! over the parting from Desmond. Anyway she seemed to have no particular interest in Arthur Chicksands, nor he in her, though his tone in speaking to her had been, naturally, familiar and intimate. But probably he was one of those able men who have little to say to the young girl, and keep their real minds for the older and experienced woman.

At any rate, Elizabeth dismissed from her mind whatever vague notion or curiosity as to a possible love-affair for Pamela in that direction might have been lurking in it. And that being so, she promptly, and without arrière pensée of any sort, allowed herself the pleasant recollection of half an hour's conversation which had put her intellectually on her mettle, and quickened those infant ambitions of a practical and patriotic kind which were beginning to rise in her.

But the Squire's coming escapade! How to stop it?—for Desmond's sake chiefly.

Dear boy! It was on a tender, almost maternal thought of him that she at last turned to sleep. But the footstep pursued her ear. What was the meaning of this long nocturnal pacing? Had the Squire, after all, a heart, or some fragment of one? Was it the parting from Desmond that thus kept him from his bed? She would have liked to think it—but did not quite succeed!

[!-- H2 anchor --]

CHAPTER VII

A week or two had passed.

The Squire was on his way to inspect his main preparations for the battle at the park gates, which he expected on the morrow. He had been out before breakfast that morning, on horseback, with one of the gardeners, to see that all the gates on the estate, except the Chetworth gate, were locked and padlocked. For the Chetworth gate, which adjoined the land to be attacked, more serious defences were in progress.

All his attempts to embarrass the action of the Committee had been so far vain. The alternatives he had proposed had been refused. Fifty acres at the Chetworth end of Mannering Park, besides goodly slices elsewhere, the County Committee meant to have. As the Squire would not plough them himself, and as the season was advancing, he had been peremptorily informed that the motor plough belonging to the County Committee would be sent over on such a day, with so many men, to do the work; the land had been surveyed; no damage would be done to the normal state of the property that could be avoided; et cetera.

So the crisis was at hand. The Squire felt battle in his blood.

As he walked along through his domain, exhilarated by the bright frosty morning, and swinging his stick like a boy, he was in the true Quixotic mood, ready to tilt at any wind-mill in his path. The state of the country, the state of the war, the state of his own affairs, had produced in him a final ferment of resentment and disgust which might explode in any folly.

Why not go to prison? He thought he could bear it. A man must stand by his opinions—even through sacrifice. It would startle the public into attention. Such outrages on the freedom, on the ancient rights of Englishmen, must not pass without protest. Yes—he felt it in him to be a martyr! They would hardly refuse him a pocket Homer in prison.

What, a month? Three weeks, in actual practice. Luckily he cared nothing at all about food—though he refused to be rationed by a despotic Government. On a handful of dates and a bit of coarse bread he had passed many a day of hard work when he was excavating in the East. One can always starve—for a purpose! The Squire conceived himself as out for Magna Charta—the root principles of British liberty. As for those chattering fellows of the Labour Party, let them conquer England if they could. While the Government ploughed up his land without leave, the Socialists would strip him of it altogether. Well, nothing for it but to fight! If one went down, one went down—but at least honourably.

In the Times that morning there was a report of a case in the north, a landowner fined £100, for letting a farm go to waste for the game's sake. And Miss Bremerton had been holding up the like fate to him that morning—because of Holme Wood. A woman of parts that!—too clever!—a disputatious creature, whom a man would like to put down. But it wasn't easy; she slipped out of your grip—gave you unexpected tits for tats. One would have thought after that business with the will, she would be anxious to make up—to show docility. In such a relation one expected docility. But not a bit of it! She grew bolder. The Squire admitted uncomfortably that it was his own fault—only, in fact, what he deserved for making a land-agent, accountant, and legal adviser out of a poor lady who had merely engaged herself to be his private secretary for classical purposes.

All the same he confessed that she had never yet neglected the classical side of her duties. His thoughts contrasted the library and the collections as they were now, with what they had been a couple of months before. Now he knew where books could be found; now one could see the precious things he possessed. Her taste—her neatness—her diligence—nothing could beat them. And she moved so quietly—had so light a foot—and always a pleasant voice and smile. Oh yes, she had been a great catch—an astonishing catch—no doubt of that. All the same he was not going to be entirely governed by her! And again he thought complacently of the weak places in her scholarship—the very limited extent of her reading—compared to his. 'By Zeus!—ει ποτ' εστιν—if it weren't for that, I should never keep the whip-hand of her at all!'

She had made a forlorn attempt again, that morning, to dissuade him from the park adventure. But there he drew the line. For there really was a line, though he admitted it might be difficult to see, considering all that he was shovelling upon her. He had been very short—perhaps she would say, very rude—with her. Well, it couldn't be helped! When she saw what he was really prepared to face, she would at least respect him. And if he was shut up, she could get on with the catalogue, and keep things going.

Altogether the Squire was above himself. The tonic air and scents of the autumn, the crisp leaves underfoot, the slight frost on the ruts, helped his general intoxication. He, the supposed scholar and recluse, was about to play a part—a rattling part. The eye of England would be upon him! He already tasted the prison fare, and found it quite tolerable.

As to Desmond—

But the thought of him no sooner crossed the Squire's mind than he dismissed it. Or rather it survived far within, as a volcanic force, from which the outer froth and ferment drew half its strength. He was being forcibly dispossessed of Desmond, just as he was being forcibly dispossessed of his farms and his park; or of his money, swallowed up in monstrous income tax.

Ah, there were Dodge and Perley, the two park-keepers, one of whom lived in the White Lodge, now only a hundred yards away. Another man who was standing by them, near the park wall, looked to the Squire like Gregson, his ejected farmer. And who was that black-coated fellow coming through the small wicket-gate beside the big one? What the devil was he doing in the park? There was a permanent grievance in the Squire's mind against the various rights-of-way through his estate. Why shouldn't he be at liberty to shut out that man if he wanted to? Of course by the mere locking and barricading of the gates, as they would be locked and barricaded on the morrow, he was flouting the law. But that was a trifle. The gates were his own anyway.

The black-coated man, however, instead of proceeding along the road, had now approached the group of men standing under the wall, and was talking with them. They themselves did not seem to be doing anything, although a large coil of barbed wire and a number of hurdles lay near them.

'Hullo, Dodge!'

At the Squire's voice the black-coated man withdrew a little distance to the roadway, where he stood watching. Of the three others the two old fellows, ex-keepers both of them, stood sheepishly silent, as the Squire neared them.

'Well, my men, good-morning! What have you done?' said the Squire peremptorily.

Dodge looked up.

'We've put a bit of wire on the gate, Squoire, an' fastened the latch of it up—and we've put a length or two along the top of the wall,' said the old man slowly—'an' then—' He paused.

'Then what?—what about the hurdles? I expected to find them all up by now!'

Dodge looked at Perley. And Perley, a gaunt, ugly fellow, who had been a famous hunter and trapper in his day, took off his hat and mopped his brow, before he said, in a small, cautious voice, entirely out of keeping with the rest of him:

'The treuth on it is, Squoire, we don't loike the job. We be afeard of their havin' the law on us.'

'Oh, you're afraid, are you?' said the Squire angrily. 'You won't stand up for your rights, anyway!'

Perley looked at his employer a little askance.

'They're not our rights, if you please, Muster Mannering. We don't have nothing to say to 'un.'

'They are your rights, you foolish fellow! If this abominable Government tramples on me to-day, it'll trample on you to-morrow.'

'Mebbe, Squoire, mebbe,' said Perley mildly. 'But Dodge and I don't feel loike standing up to 'un. We was engaged to mind the roads an' the leaves, an' a bit rabbitin', an' sich like. But this sort of job is somethin' out o' the common, Muster Mannering. We don't hold wi' it. The County they've got a powerful big road-engine, Squoire. They'll charge them gates to-morrow—there 'll be a terr'ble to do. My wife, she's frightened to death. She's got a cart from Laycocks, and she's takin' all our bit things over to her mother's. She won't stay, she says, to be blowed up, not for no one. Them Governments is terr'ble powerful, Squoire. If they was to loose a bit o' gas on us—or some o' they stuffs they put into shells? Noa, Noa, Squoire'—Perley shook his head resolutely, imitated exactly by Dodge—'we'll do our dooty in them things we was engaged to do. But we're not foightin' men!'

'You needn't tell me that!' said the Squire, exasperated. 'The look of you's enough. So you refuse to barricade those gates?'

'Well, we do, Squoire,' said Perley, in a tone of forced cheerfulness.

'Yes, we do,' said Dodge slowly, copying the manner of his leader.

All this time Gregson had been standing a little apart from the rest. His face showed traces of recent drinking, his hands wandered restlessly from his coat-collar to his pockets, his clothes were shabby and torn. But when the Squire looked round him, as though invoking some one or something to aid him against these deserters, Gregson came forward.

'If you want any help, Mr. Mannering, I'm your man. I suppose these fellows'll lend a hand with carrying these things up to the gates. They'll not risk their precious skins much by doing that!'

Perley and Dodge replied with alacrity that so far they would gladly oblige the Squire, and they began to shoulder the hurdles.

It was at that moment that the Squire caught the eye of the black-coated man, who had been observing the whole proceedings from about ten yards off. The expression of the eye roused in Mannering an itching desire to lay immediate hands on its possessor. He strode up to him.

'I don't know, sir, why you stand there, looking on at things that are no business of yours,' he said angrily. 'If you want to know your way anywhere, one of my men here will show you.'

'Oh, thank you,' said the other tranquilly. 'I know my way perfectly.' He held up an ordnance map, which he carried in his hand. 'I'm an engineer. I come from London, and I'm bound for a job at Crewe. But I'm very fond of country walking when the weather's good. I've walked about a good bit of England, in my time, but this part is a bit I don't know. So, as I had two days' holiday, I thought I'd have a look at your place on the road. And as you are aware, Mr. Mannering'—he pointed to the map—'this is a right-of-way, and you can't turn me out.'

'All the same, sir, you are on my property,' said the Squire hotly, 'and a right-of-way only means a right of passing through. I should be much obliged if you would hurry yourself a little.'

The other laughed. He was a slim fellow, apparently about thirty, in a fresh, well-cut, serge suit. A book was sticking out of one pocket; he returned the map to the other. He had the sallow look of one who has spent years in hot workshops, and a slight curvature of the spine; but his eyes were singularly, audaciously bright, and all his movements alert and decided.

'It's not often one sees such a typical bit of feudalism as this,' he said, without the smallest embarrassment, pointing to the old men, the gates, the hurdles, which Gregson was now placing in position, and finally the Squire himself. 'I wouldn't have missed it for worlds. It's as good as a play. You're fighting the County Agricultural War Committee, I understand from these old fellows, because they want a bit of your park to grow more food?'

'Well, sir, and how does it matter to you?'

'Oh, it matters a great deal,' said the other, smiling. 'I want to be able to tell my grandchildren—when I get 'em—that I once saw this kind of thing. They'll never believe me. For in their day, you see, there'll be no squires, and no parks. The land 'll be the people's, and all this kind of thing—your gates, your servants, your fine house, your game-coverts, and all the rest of it—will be like a bit of history out of Noah's Ark.'

The Squire looked at him attentively.

'You're a queer kind of chap,' he said, half contemptuously. 'I suppose you're one of those revolutionary fellows the papers talk about?'

'That's it. Only there are a good many of us. When the time comes,' he nodded pleasantly, 'we shall know how to deal with you.'

'It'll take a good deal longer than you think,' said the Squire coolly; 'unless indeed you borrow the chap from Russia who's invented the machine for cutting off five hundred heads at once, by electricity. That might hasten matters a little!'

He had by now entirely recovered his chaffing, reckless temper, and was half enjoying the encounter.