Elizabeth was walking home from the village through the park.  Still the same dry east-wind weather—­very cold in the wind, very warm in the sun.  If the German offensive began while these fine days held, they would have the luck of weather as we had never had it.  Think of the drenching rains and winds of the Passchendaele attack!  In the popular mind the notion of ‘a German God’ was taking actual concrete shape.  A huge and monstrous form, sitting on a German hill, plotting with the Kaiser, and ordering the weather precisely as the Kaiser wished—­it was thus that English superstition, aided by Imperial speeches and telegrams, began to be haunted.

Yet the world was still beautiful—­the silvery stems of the trees, the flitting of the birds, the violet carpets underfoot.  On the fighting line itself there was probably a new crop of poets, hymning the Spring with Death for listener, as Julian Grenfell and Rupert Brooke had hymned it, in that first year of the war that seems now an eternity behind us.

Moving along a path converging on her own, Elizabeth perceived the Squire.  For the first time that morning he had put off their joint session, and she had not seen him all day.  Her mind was now always uneasily aware of him—­aware, too, of some change in him, for which in some painful way she felt herself responsible.  He had grown strangely tame and placable, and it was generally noticed that he looked older.  Yet he was more absorbed than ever in the details of Greek research and the labour of his catalogue.  Only, of an evening, he read the Times for a couple of hours, generally in complete silence, while Elizabeth and Mrs. Gaddesden talked and knitted.

An extraordinary softness—­an extraordinary compassion—­was steadily invading Elizabeth’s mind in regard to him.  Something suggested to her that he had come into life maimed of some essential element of being, possessed by his fellow-men, and that he was now conscious of the lack, as a Greek Faun might be conscious of the difference between his life and that of struggling and suffering men.  Nothing, indeed, could less suggest the blithe nature-life which Greek imagination embodied in the Faun, than the bizarre and restless aspect of the Squire.  This spare white-haired man, with his tempers and irritations, was far indeed from Greek joyousness.  And yet the Greek sense of beauty, half intellectual, half sensuous, had always seemed to her the strongest force in him.  Was it now besieged by something else?—­was the Faun in him, at last, after these three years, beginning to feel the bitter grip of humanity?

’"Deeper”?  I don’t know what you mean.  There is nothing “deep” in me!’ She often recalled that saying of his, and the look of perplexity which had accompanied it.

To herself of late he had been always courteous and indulgent; she had hardly had an uncivil word from him!  But it seemed to her that he had also begun to avoid her, and the suspicion hurt her amazingly.  If indeed it were true, then leave Mannering she must.