Yes, attach her to the place; bind her! hold her!—­that was what he wanted.  Otherwise, how hideously uncertain it all was!  She might go at any time.  Her mother might be ill—­old ladies have a way of being ill.  Her brother might be wounded—­or killed.  Either of those events would carry her off—­out of his ken.  But if she were engaged deeply enough in the estate affairs she would surely come back.  He knew her!—­she hated to leave things unfinished.  He was eager now to heap all kinds of responsibilities upon her.  He would be meek and pliable; he would put no sort of obstacles in her way.  She would have no excuse for giving him notice again.  He would put up with all her silly Jingoism—­if only she would stay!

But at this point the Squire suddenly pulled up short in his pacing and excitedly asked himself the question, which half the people about him were already beginning to ask.

‘Why shouldn’t I marry her?’

He stood transfixed—­the colour rising in his thin cheeks.

Hitherto the notion, if it had ever knocked at the outer door of the brain, had been chased away with mockery.  And he had no sooner admitted it now than he drove it out again.  He was simply afraid of it—­in terror lest any suspicion of it should reach Elizabeth.  Her loyalty, her single-mindedness, her freedom from the smallest taint of intrigue—­he would have answered for them with all he possessed.  If, for a moment, she chose to think that he had misinterpreted her kindness, her services in any vile and vulgar way, why, he might lose her on the instant!  Let him walk warily—­do nothing at least to destroy the friend in her, before he grasped at anything more.

Besides, how could she put up with him?  ’I am the dried husk of a man!’ thought the Squire, with vehemence.  ’I couldn’t learn her ways now, nor she mine.  No; let us be as we are—­only more so!’

But he was shaken through and through; first by that vanishing of his boy into the furnace of the war, which had brought him at last within the grip of the common grief, the common fear, and now by this strange thought which had invaded him.

* * * * *

After dinner, Elizabeth, who was rather pale, but as cheerful and self-possessed as usual, put Mrs. Gaddesden’s knitting to rights at least three times, and held the wool for that lady to wind till her arm ached.  Then Mrs. Gaddesden retired to bed; the Squire, who with only occasional mutterings and mumblings had been deep in Elizabeth’s copy of the Times, which she had at last ventured to produce in public, went off to the library, and Elizabeth and Pamela were left in the hall alone.