He put up his eye-glass, and examined the figure as it came nearer.

‘She’s just come up, I suppose, from the farm,’ said Pamela, pointing to some red roofs among the trees, in the wide hollow below the hill.

‘"Athene Ageleie"!’ murmured the Major, who had been proxime for the Ireland, and a Balliol man.  ’She holds herself well—­beautiful hair!’

‘Beryl, this is Miss Bremerton,’ said Aubrey Mannering, with a cordial ring in his voice, as he introduced his fiancee to Elizabeth.  The two shook hands, and Elizabeth thought the girl’s manner a little stand-off, and wondered why.

The pony had soon been tied up, and the party spread themselves on the grass of the hill-side; for Holme Wood Hill was a famous point of view, and the sunny peace of the afternoon invited loitering.  For miles to the eastward spread an undulating chalk plain, its pale grey or purplish soil showing in the arable fields where the stubbles were just in process of ploughing, its monotony broken by a vast wood of oak and beech into which the hill-side ran down—­a wood of historic fame, which had been there when Senlac was fought, had furnished ship-timber for the Armada, and sheltered many a cavalier fugitive of the Civil Wars.

The wood indeed, which belonged to the Squire, was a fragment of things primeval.  For generations the trees in it had sprung up, flourished, and fallen as they pleased.  There were corners of it where the north-west wind sweeping over the bare down above it had made pathways of death and ruin; sinister places where the fallen or broken trunks of the great beech trees, as they had crashed down-hill upon and against each other, had assumed all sorts of grotesque and phantasmal attitudes, as in a trampled melee of giants; there were other parts where slender plumed trees, rising branchless to a great height above open spaces, took the shape from a distance of Italian stone palms, and gave a touch of southern or romantic grace to the English midland scene; while at their feet, the tops of the more crowded sections of the wood lay in close, billowy masses of leaf, the oaks vividly green, the beeches already aflame.

‘Who says there’s a war?’ said Captain Chicksands, sinking luxuriously into a sunny bed of dry leaves, conveniently placed in front of Elizabeth.  ’Miss Bremerton, you and I were, I understand, at the same University?’

Elizabeth assented.

’Is it your opinion that Universities are any good?—­that after the war there are going to be any Universities?’

‘Only those that please the Labour Party!’ put in Mannering.

’Oh, I’m not afraid of the Labour Party—­awfully good fellows, many of them.  The sooner they make a Government the better.  They’ve got to learn their lessons like the rest of us.  But I do want to know whether Miss Bremerton thinks Oxford was any use—­before the war—­and is going to be any use after the war?  It’s all right now, of course, for the moment, with the Colleges full of cadets and wounded men.  But would you put the old Oxford back if you could?’