very little.  I told you he never came to Desmond’s funeral.  All business he hands over to Elizabeth, and what she asks him he generally does.  But we all have vague, black fears about him.  I know Elizabeth has.  Yet she is quite clear she can’t stay here much longer.  Dear Arthur, I don’t know exactly what happened, but I think father asked her to marry him, and she said no.  And I am tolerably sure that I counted for a good deal in it—­horrid wretch that I am!—­that she thought it would make me unhappy.

’Well, I am properly punished.  For if or when she goes away—­and you and I are married—­if there is to be any marrying any more in this awful world!—­what will become of my father?  He has been a terrifying mystery to me all my life.  Now it is not that any longer.  I know at least that he worshipped Desmond.  But I know also that I mean nothing to him.  I don’t honestly think it was much my fault—­and it can’t be helped.  And nobody else in the family matters.  The only person who does matter is Elizabeth.  And I quite see that she can’t stay here indefinitely.  She told me she promised Desmond she would stay as long as she could.  Just at present, of course, she is the mainspring of everything on the estate.  And they have actually made her this last week Vice-Chairman of the County War Agricultural Committee.  She refused, but they made her.  Think of that—­a woman—­with all those wise men!  She asked father’s leave.  He just looked at her, and I saw the tears come into her eyes.

’As to Beryl and Aubrey, he was here last Sunday, and she spent the day with us.  He seems to lean upon her in a new way—­and she looks different somehow—­happier, I think.  He told me, the day after Desmond died, that Dezzy had said something to him that had given him courage—­“courage to go on,” I think he said.  I didn’t ask him what he meant, and he didn’t tell me.  But I am sure he has told Beryl, and either that—­or something else—­has made her more confident in herself—­and about him.  They are to be married quite soon.  Last week father sent him, without a word, a copy of his will.  Aubrey says it is very fair.  Mannering goes to him, of course.  You know that Elizabeth refused to witness the codicil father wrote last October disinheriting Aubrey, when he was so mad with Sir Henry?  It was the first thing that made father take real notice of her.  She had only been six weeks here!

     ’Good-night, my dearest, dearest Arthur!  Don’t be too much
     disappointed in me.  I shall grow up some day.’

A few days later the Squire came back from Fallerton to find nobody in the house, apparently, but himself.  He went through the empty hall and the library, and shut himself up there.  He carried an evening paper crumpled in his hand.  It contained a detailed report of the breaking of the Portuguese centre near Richebourg St. Vaast on April 10, and the consequent retreat, over some seven miles, since that day of the British line, together with the more recent news of the capture of Armentieres and Merville.  Sitting down at his own table he read the telegrams again, and then in the stop-press Sir Douglas Haig’s Order of the Day—­