Elizabeth paused in some dismay.

‘You remember—­’ she began.

‘Remember what?’ It was long since she had heard so snappish a tone.

‘That you authorized me—­’

’Oh, I daresay, I gave myself away—­I’m always doing so.  I don’t mean half I say.  You’re too full of business—­you take me up too quick.  What are those papers you’ve got there?’

Elizabeth’s red cheeks showed her taken aback.  It was the first time for weeks that her employer had turned upon her so.  She had grown so accustomed to managing him, to taming the irritable temper that no one else but she could cope with, and, unconsciously, so proud of her success, that she was not prepared for this attack.  She met it meekly.

‘I have a proposal here to submit to you, from ——­ & Co.’ (she named a firm of timber-merchants famous throughout the Midlands).  ’There is nothing in it—­Captain Dell is certain—­that would injure the estate.  You have such masses of timber!  And, if you don’t sell, you may find it commandeered.  You know what’s happened to Lord Radley?’

The Squire sulkily demanded to be informed.  Elizabeth told the story, standing at his desk, like a clerk making a report.  It seemed to enrage her auditor.

‘This accursed war!’ he broke out, when she had finished—­’it makes slaves and idiots of us all.  It must—­it shall end!’ And marching tempestuously up and down, he went off into one of the pessimist and pacifist harangues to which she was more or less accustomed.  Who would rid the country of a Government that could neither make peace nor make war?—­that foresaw nothing—­that was making life unbearable at home, by a network of senseless restrictions, while it wasted millions abroad, and in the military camps!  The Labour Party were the only people with a grain of sense.  They at least would try to make peace.  Only, when they had made it, to be governed by them would be even worse than to be governed by Lloyd George.  There was no possible life anywhere for decent quiet people.  And as for the ravaging and ruin of the woods that was going on all over England—­

‘The submarine return is worse this week,’ said Elizabeth in a low voice.

She had gone to her own table and was sitting there till the hurricane should pass over.  There was in her a fresh and chafing sense of the obstacles laid in her path—­the path of the scientific and successful organizer—­by the Squire’s perversities.  It was not as though he were a pacifist by conviction, religious or other.  She had seen him rout and trample on not a few genuine professors of the faith.  His whole opposition to the war rested on the limitations and discomforts inflicted on his own life.  It reminded her of certain fragments of dialogue she had overheard in the winter, where she had chanced to find herself alone in a railway carriage full of a group of disaffected workmen returning from a strike meeting at Leicester.  ’If there are many like these, is the country worth saving?’ she was saying to herself all the time, in a dumb passion.