prate and wrangle and scheme, as eager and as alive as their descendants of to-day.  Soon his high, tempestuous laugh rang out; Elizabeth’s gentler mirth answering.  Sometimes there was a dispute about a word or a rendering; she would put up her own view, with obstinacy, so that he might have the pleasure of knocking it down.  And all through there was the growing sense of comradeship, of mutual understanding, which, in their classical work at least, had been always present for Elizabeth, since her first acquaintance with her strange employer.

When she rose, reluctantly, at the sound of the dressing-bell, the Squire paced up and down while she put her books and papers away.  Then as she was going, he turned abruptly—­

‘I told Forest to order the Times—­will you see he does it?’

‘Certainly.’

‘I loathe all newspapers,’ he said sombrely.  ’If we must go to the devil, I don’t want to know too much about it.  But still—­’

She waited a moment, but as nothing more came she was leaving the room, when he added—­

’And don’t forget the timber business to-morrow afternoon.  Tell Dell to meet us in Cross Wood.’

* * * * *

When she had gone, the Squire still continued pacing, absorbed in meeting the attack of new and strange ideas.  He had always been a man with a singularly small reflective gift.  Self-examination—­introspection of any sort—­were odious to him.  He lived on stimulus from outside, attracted or repelled, amused or interested, bored or angry, as the succession of events or impressions might dictate.  To collect beautiful things was a passion with him, and he was proud of the natural taste and instinct, which generally led him right.  But for ’aesthetics’—­the philosophy of art—­he had nothing but contempt.  The volatile, restless mind escaped at once from the concentration asked of it; and fell back on what the Buddhist calls ‘Maia,’ the gay and changing appearances of things, which were all he wanted.  And it was because the war had interfered with this pleasant and perpetual challenge to the senses of the outer world, because it forced a man back on general ideas that he did not want to consider—­God, Country, Citizenship—­that the Squire had hated the war.

But this woman who had become an inmate of his house, while she ministered to all the tastes that the Squire had built up as a screen between himself and either the tragic facts of contemporary life, or any troublesome philosophizing about them, was yet gradually, imperceptibly, drawing the screen aside.  Her humanity was developing the feeble shoots of sympathy and conscience in himself.  What she felt, he was beginning to feel; and when she hated anything he must at least uncomfortably consider why.