‘You think the price these people offer is a fair one?’ She pointed to the draft contract.

’Excellent!  The Squire won’t get nearly as much from the Government.’

‘What one might do with some of it for the estate!’ said Elizabeth, looking up, her blue eyes dancing in the lamplight.

‘Rebuild half the cottages?’ said the other, smiling, as he rose.  ’A village club-house, a communal kitchen, a small holdings scheme—­all the things we’ve talked about?  Oh yes, you could do all that and more.  The Squire doesn’t know what he possesses.’

‘Well, I’ll take the papers to him,’ said Elizabeth, holding out her hands for them.  ‘I may perhaps catch him to-night’

A little more business talk, and the agent departed.  Then Elizabeth dreamily—­still cogitating a hundred things—­touched an electric bell.  A girl typist, who acted as her clerk, came in from an adjoining room.  Elizabeth rapidly dictated a number of letters, stayed for a little friendly gossip with the girl about her father in the Army Service Corps, who had been in hospital at Rouen, and had just finished, when the gong rang for afternoon tea.

* * * * *

When Elizabeth entered, the hall was crowded.  It was the principal sitting-room of the house, now that for reasons of economy fires were seldom lit in the drawing-rooms.  Before Elizabeth’s advent it had been a dingy, uncomfortable place, but she and Pamela had entirely transformed it.  As in the estate so in the house, the Squire did not know what he possessed.  In all old houses with a continuous life, there are accumulations of furniture and stores, discarded by the generation of one day, and brought back by the fashion of the next.  A little routing in attics and forgotten cupboards and chests had produced astonishing results.  Chippendale chairs and settees had been brought down from the servants’ bedrooms; two fine Dutch cabinets had been discovered amid a mass of lumber in an outhouse; a tall Japanese screen, dating from the end of the eighteenth century, and many pairs of linen curtains embroidered about the same time in branching oriental patterns by the hands of Mannering ladies, had been unearthed, and Pamela—­for Elizabeth having started the search had interfered very little with its results—­had spent some of her now scanty leisure in making the best of the finds.  The hall was now a charming place, scented, moreover, on this January evening by the freesias and narcissus that Elizabeth had managed to rear in the house itself, and Pamela, who had always been ashamed of her own ill-kept and out-at-elbows home, as compared with the perfections of Chetworth, had been showing Arthur and Beryl Chicksands what had been done to renovate the old house since they were last in it—­’and all without spending a penny!’—­with a girlish pleasure which in the Captain’s opinion became her greatly.  Pamela needed indeed a good deal of animation to be as handsome as she deserved to be!  A very critical observer took note that her stock of it was rapidly rising.  It was the same with the letters, too, which for a month or so past, she had condescended to write him, after treating him most uncivilly in the autumn, and never answering a long screed—­’and a jolly good one!’—­which he had written her from Paris in November.