Northwards the valley is a slender slip of green bordering the slender river.  Southwards, below the bridge, the water meadows widen out past Sutton’s farm.  From the front windows of the Manor Farm house you see them, green between the brown trunks of the elms on the road bank.  From the back you look out across orchard and pasture to the black, still water and yellow osier beds above the Mill.  Beyond the water a double line of beeches, bare delicate branches, rounded head after rounded head, climbs a hillock in a steep curve, to part and meet again in a thick ring at the top.

The house front stretches along a sloping grass plot, the immense porch built out like a wing with one ball-topped gable above it, a smaller gable in the roof behind.  On either side two rows of wide black windows, heavy browed, with thick stone mullions.

Barker, Jerrold Fielding’s agent, used to live there; but before the spring of nineteen sixteen Barker had joined up, Wyck Manor had been turned into a home for convalescent soldiers, and Anne was living with Colin at the Manor Farm.

Half of her Ilford land had been taken by the government; and she had let the rest together with the house and orchard.  Instead of her own estate she had the Manor to look after now.  It had been impossible in war-time to fill Barker’s place, and Anne had become Jerrold’s agent.  She had begun with a vague promise to give a look round now and then; but when the spring came she found herself doing Barker’s work, keeping the farm accounts, ordering fertilizers, calculating so many hundredweights of superphosphate of lime, or sulphate of ammonia, or muriate of potash to the acre; riding about on Barker’s horse, looking after the ploughing; plodding through the furrows of the hill slopes to see how the new drillers were working; going the round of the sheep-pens to keep count of the sick ewes and lambs; carrying the motherless lambs in her arms from the fold to the warm kitchen.

She went through February rain and snow, through March wind and sleet, and through the mists of the low meadows; her feet were loaded with earth from the ploughed fields; her nostrils filled with the cold, rich smell of the wet earth; the rank, sharp smell of swedes, the dry, pungent smell of straw and hay; the thick, oily, woolly smell of the folds, the warm, half-sweet, half sour smell of the cattle sheds, of champed fodder, of milky cow’s breath; the smell of hot litter and dung.

At five and twenty she had reached the last clear decision of her beauty.  Dressed in riding coat and breeches, her body showed more slender and more robust than ever.  Rain, sun and wind were cosmetics to her firm, smooth skin.  Her eyes were bright dark, washed with the clean air.

On her Essex farm and afterwards at the War she had learned how to handle men.  Sulky Curtis, who grumbled under Barker’s rule, surrendered to Anne without a scowl.  When Anne came riding over the Seven Acre field, lazy Ballinger pulled himself together and ploughed through the two last furrows that he would have left for next day in Barker’s time.  Even for Ballinger and Curtis she had smiles that atoned for her little air of imperious command.