’I only meant that, in times like these, it’s no good planning anything twenty years ahead.  We’ve got to win the war, haven’t we?—­that’s the first thing.  Well, now, I must go and clean up.  Who’s here?’

‘Alice and Margaret,’ said Pamela.  ‘And father’s new secretary.’

‘You never told me about him,’ said Aubrey indifferently, as he rose.

‘"Him” indeed!’ laughed Desmond.  ‘Nothing of the sort!’

Aubrey turned a puzzled look upon him.

‘What! a lady?’

Desmond grinned.

’First Class in Mods, and an awful swell.  Father can’t let her out of his sight.  Says he never had anybody so good.’

‘And she’ll end by bossing us all,’ put in Pamela.  ’She’s begun it already.  Now you really must go and dress.’

* * * * *

When the eldest son of the house entered the drawing-room, he found everybody gathered there but his father and the Rector, who was coming to dine.  He was at once seized on by his married sisters, who saw him very rarely.  Then Pamela led him up to a tall lady in pale blue.

‘My eldest brother—­Miss Bremerton.’

He looked at her with curiosity, and was glad when, after the arrival of his father and the Rector, it fell to him to take the new secretary in to dinner.  His father’s greeting to him had been decidedly cool—­the greeting of a man who sees a fight impending and wishes to give away nothing to his opponent.  In fact the two men had never been on really cordial terms since August 1914, when Aubrey had thrown up his post in the Foreign Office to apply for one of the first temporary commissions in the New Army.  The news came at a moment when the Squire was smarting under the breakdown of a long-cherished scheme of exploration in the Greek islands, which was to have been realized that very autumn—­a scheme towards which his whole narrow impetuous mind had been turned for years.  No more Hellenic or Asia Minor excavations! no more cosmopolitan Wissenschaft!  On that fatal August 4 a whole world went down submerged beneath the waves of war, and the Squire cared for no other.  His personal chagrin showed itself in abuse of the bungling diplomats and ‘swashbuckler’ politicians who, according to him, had brought us into war.  So that when Aubrey applied for a commission, the Squire, mainly to relieve his own general irritation, had quarrelled with him for some months, and was only outwardly reconciled when his son came home invalided in 1915.

During the summer of 1917, Aubrey, after spending three days’ leave at Mannering, had gone on to stay at Chetworth with the Chicksands for a week.  The result of that visit was a letter to his father in which he announced his engagement to Beryl.  The Squire could make then no open opposition, since he was still on friendly terms with Sir Henry, who had indeed done him more than one good turn.  But in reply to his son’s letter, he stood entirely