But, on the other hand, she was not going to give up her post because the twins had taken some unjust prejudice against her!  Nothing of the kind.  She had those ash trees to look after!  She was tolerably sure that a thorough search would comb out a good many more for the Air Board from the Squire’s woods than had yet been discovered.  The Fallerton hospital wanted more accommodation.  There was an empty house belonging to the Squire, which she had already begun, before her absence, with his grudging permission, to get ready for the purpose. That had to be finished.  The war workroom in the village, which she had started, must have another Superintendent, the first having turned out a useless chatterbox.  Elizabeth had her successor already in mind.  There were three or four applications waiting for the two other neglected farms.  Captain Dell was hurrying on the repairs; but there was more money wanted—­she must get it out of the Squire.  Then as to labour—­German prisoners?—­or women?

Her brain began to teem with a score of projects.  But after lying awake another hour, she pulled herself up.  ’This won’t do.  I must have six hours’ sleep.’  And she resolutely set herself to repeat one of the nursery poems of her childhood, till, wooed by its silly monotony, sleep came.

It was a bright March day in the Mannering woods, where the Squire, Elizabeth, and Captain Dell were hanging about waiting for Sir Henry Chicksands.  The astonishing warmth and sunshine of the month had brought out a shimmer of spring everywhere, reddened the great heads of the oaks, and set the sycamore buds shining like jewels in the pale blue.  There was an endless chatter and whirr of wood-pigeons in the high tree-tops, and underfoot the anemones and violets were busy pushing their gentle way through the dead leaves of autumn.  The Squire’s beechwoods were famous in the neighbourhood, and he was still proud of them; though for many years past they had gone unnoticed to decay, and were in some places badly diseased.

To Elizabeth, in an artistic mood—­the mood which took her in town to see exhibitions of Brabazon or Steer—­the woods were fairyland.  The high slender oak of the middle wood, the spreading oak that lived on its borders, the tall columnar beech feathering into the sky, its grey stem shining as though by some magic property in the beautiful forest twilight—­the gleams and the shadows, the sounds and scents of the woodland world—­she could talk or write about these things as poetically, and as sincerely, as any other educated person when put to it; but on this occasion, it has to be said frankly, she was thinking of nothing but aeroplanes and artillery waggons.  And she had by now developed a kind of flair in the woods, which was the astonishment of Captain Dell, himself no mean forester.  As far as ash was concerned, she was a hunter on the trail.  She could distinguish an ash tree yards ahead through a mixed or tangled wood, and track it unerringly.  The thousand ash that she, and the old park-keepers set on by her, had already found for the Government, were nothing to what she meant to find.  The Squire’s woods, some of which she had not yet explored at all, were as mines to her in which she dug for treasure—­for the timber that might save her country.