’Beryl declares that Pamela is going to be a beauty—­and clever besides.  She used to be a jolly child.  But then they go to school and grow up quite different.  I’ve hardly seen her for a year and a half.’

’Well, you’ll judge for yourself.  Good luck to you!  I don’t envy you your job.’

’Good Lord, no!  But you see I’m Chairman of this blessed show, and they all fixed on me to bell the cat.  We want a hundred acres of the Park, a new agent, notices for three farmers, etcetera!’

The Rector whistled.  ’I shall wait, on tiptoe, to see what happens!  What are your powers?’

‘Oh, tremendous!’

‘So you have him?  Well, good-day.’

And the Rector was passing on.  But Sir Henry stooped over his horse’s neck—­’As you know, perhaps, it would be very inconvenient to my poor little Beryl if Mannering were to make a quarrel of it with me.’

‘Ah, I gathered that she and Aubrey were engaged,’ said the Rector cordially.  ‘Best congratulations!  Has the Squire behaved well?’

‘Moderately.  He declares he has no money to give them.’

’And yet he spent eighteen hundred pounds last week at that Christie sale!’ said the Rector with a laugh.  ’And now I suppose the new secretary will add fuel to the flame.  I saw Pamela for a minute alone, and she said Miss Bremerton was “just as much gone on Greek things as father,” and they were like a pair of lunatics when the new vases came down.’

‘Oh, blow the secretary!’ said Sir Henry with exasperation.  ’And meanwhile his daughters can’t get a penny out of him for any war purpose whatever!  Well, I must go on.’

They parted, and Sir Henry put his cob into a sharp trot which soon brought him in sight of a distant building—­low and irregular—­surrounded by trees, and by the wide undulating slopes of the park.

‘Dreadfully ugly place,’ he said to himself, as the house grew plainer; ’rebuilt at the worst time, by a man with no more taste than a broomstick.  Still, he was the sixteenth owner, from father to son.  That’s something.’

And he fell to thinking, with that half-ironic depreciation which he allowed to himself, and would have stood from no one else, of his own brand-new Georgian house, built from the plans of a famous American architect, ten years before the war, out of the profits of an abnormally successful year, and furnished in what he believed to be faultless taste by the best professional decorator he could find.

’Yet compared to a Mannering, what do I mean to the people here?  You scarcely begin to take root in this blessed country under half a century.  Mannering is exceedingly unpopular; the people think him a selfish idler; but if he chose he could whistle them back with a hundredth part of the trouble it would take me!  And if Aubrey wanted to go into Parliament, he’d probably have his pick of the county divisions.  Curious fellow, Aubrey!  I wonder exactly what Beryl sees in him?’