Beyond the garden stretched a green rim of park, with a gleam of water in the middle distance which seemed to mean either a river or a pond, many fine scattered trees, and, girdling the whole, a line of wooded hill.  Just such a view as any county—­almost—­in this beautiful England can produce.  It was one of the first warm days of a belated spring.  A fortnight before, park and hills and garden had been deep in snow.  Now Nature, eager, and one might think ashamed, was rushing at her neglected work, determined to set the full spring going in a minimum of hours.  The grass seemed to be growing, and the trees leafing under the spectator’s eyes.  There was already a din of cuckoos in the park, and the nesting birds were busy.

The scene was both familiar and unfamiliar to Lord Buntingford.  He had been brought up in it as a child.  But he had only inherited the Beechmark property from his uncle just before the war, and during almost the whole of the war he had been so hard at work, as a volunteer in the Admiralty, that he had never been able to do more than run down once or twice a year to see his agent, go over his home farm, and settle what timber was to be cut before the Government commandeered it.  He was not yet demobilized, as his naval uniform showed.  There was a good deal of work still to do in his particular office, and he was more than willing to do it.  But in a few months’ time at any rate—­he was just now taking a fortnight’s leave—­he would be once more at a loose end.  That condition of things must be altered as soon as possible.  When he looked back over the years of driving work through which he had just passed to the years of semi-occupation before them, he shrank from those old conditions in disgust.  Something must be found to which he could enslave himself again.  Liberty was the great delusion—­at least for him.

Politics?—­Well, there was the House of Lords, and the possibility of some minor office, when his Admiralty work was done.  And the whole post-war situation was only too breathless.  But for a man who, as soon as he had said Yes, was immediately seized with an insensate desire to look once more at all the reasons which might have induced him to say No, there was no great temptation in politics.  Work was what the nation wanted—­not talk.

Agriculture and the Simple Life?—­Hardly!  Five years of life in London, four of them under war conditions, had spoilt any taste for the country he had ever possessed.  He meant to do his duty by his estate, and by the miscellaneous crowd of people, returned soldiers and others, who seemed to wish to settle upon it.  But to take the plunge seriously, to go in heart and soul for intensive culture or scientific dairy-farming, to spend lonely winters in the country with his bailiffs and tenants for company—­it was no good talking about it—­he knew it could not be done.

And—­finally—­what was the good of making plans at all?—­with these new responsibilities which friendship and pity and weakness of will had lately led him to take upon himself?—­For two years at least he would not be able to plan his life in complete freedom.