Elizabeth on returning to her table found the library empty.  The Squire had been called away by his agent and one of the new officials of the county, and had not yet returned.  She expected him to return in a bad—­possibly an outrageous temper.  For she gathered that the summons had something to do with the decree of the County War Agricultural Committee that fifty acres, at least, of Mannering Park were to be given back to the plough, which, indeed, had only ceased to possess them some sixty years before.  The Squire had gone out pale with fury, and she looked anxiously at her work, to see what there might be in it to form an excuse for a hurricane.

She could find nothing, however, likely to displease a sane man.  And as she was at a standstill till he came back, she slipped an unfinished letter out of her notebook, and went on with it.  It was to a person whom she addressed as ‘my darling Dick.’

’I have now been rather more than a month here.  You can’t imagine what a queer place it is, nor what a queer employer I have struck.  There might be no war—­as far as Mannering is concerned.  The Squire is always engaged in mopping it out, like Mrs. Partington.  He takes no newspaper, except a rag called the Lanchester Mail, which attacks the Government, the Army—­as far as it dare—­and “secret diplomacy.”  It comes out about once a week with a black page, because the Censor has been sitting on it.  Desmond Mannering—­that’s the gunner-son who came on leave a week ago and is just going off to an artillery camp—­and I, conspire through the butler—­who is a dear, and a patriot—­to get the Times; but the Squire never sees it.  Desmond reads it in bed in the morning, I read it in bed in the evening, and Pamela Mannering, Mr. Desmond’s twin, comes in last thing, in her dressing-gown, and steals it.

’I seem indeed to be living in the heart of a whirlwind, for the Squire is fighting everybody all round, and as he is the least reticent of men, and I have to write his letters, I naturally, even by now, know a good deal about him.  Shortly put, he is in a great mess.  The estate is riddled with mortgages, which it would be quite easy to reduce.  For instance, there are masses of timber, crying to be cut.  He consults me often in the naivest way.  You remember that I trained for six months as an accountant.  I assure you that it comes in extremely useful now!  I can see my way a little where he can’t see it at all.  He glories in the fact that he was never any good at arithmetic or figures of any kind, and never looked at either after “Smalls.”  The estate of course used to be looked after in the good old-fashioned way by the family lawyers.  But a few years ago the Squire quarrelled with these gentlemen, recovered all his papers, which no doubt went back to King Alfred, and resolved to deal with things himself.  There is an office here, and a small attorney from Fallerton comes over twice or three times a week.  But the