Pamela laughed excitedly, and shook her head.

’Oh, no, father, you won’t be a hero—­only a laughing-stock!  That’s what Desmond minds so much.  They won’t send you to prison.  Some tiresome old Judge will give you a talking-to in Court, and you won’t be able to answer him back.  And then they’ll fine you—­and we shall be a little more boycotted than we were before!  That’s all that’ll happen!’

‘"Boycotted"?—­what do you mean?’ said the Squire haughtily.

‘Oh, father, can’t you feel it?’ cried Pamela.

‘As if one man could pit himself against a nation!’ said Mrs. Strang, in that manner of controlled emotion which the Squire detested.  He rarely felt emotion, but when he did, he let it go.

Peremptorily he turned them all out, giving strict orders that nothing he had done should be interfered with.  Then he attempted to go on with some work of his own, but he could not bring his mind to bear.  Finally he seized his hat and went out into the park to see if the populace were really rising.  It was a cold October evening, with a waxing moon, and a wind that was rapidly bringing the dead leaves to earth.  Not a soul was to be seen!  Only once the Squire thought he heard the sound of distant guns; and two aeroplanes crossed rapidly overhead sailing into the western sky.  Everywhere the war!—­the cursed, cursed obsession of it!

For the first time there was a breach in the Squire’s defences, which for three years he had kept up almost intact.  He had put literature, and art, and the joys of the connoisseur between himself and the measureless human ill around him.  It had spoilt his personal life, had interfered with his travels, his diggings, his friendships with foreign scholars.  Well, then, as far as he could he would take no account of it, would shut it out, and rail at the men and the forces that made it.  He barely looked at the newspapers; he never touched a book dealing with the war.  It seemed to him a triumph of mind and intelligence when he succeeded in shutting out the hurly-burly altogether.  Only, when in the name of the war his private freedom and property were interfered with, he had flamed out into hysterical revolt.  Old aristocratic instincts came to the aid of passionate will, and, perhaps, of an uneasy conscience.

And now in the man’s vain but not ignoble soul there stirred a first passing terror of what the war might do with him, if he were forced to feel it—­to let it in.  He saw it as a veiled Presence at the Door—­and struggled with it blindly.

He was just turning back to the house, when he saw a figure approaching in the distance which he recognized.  It was that of a man, once a farmer of his, and a decent fellow—­oh, that he confessed!—­with whom he had had a long quarrel over a miserable sum of money, claimed by the tenant when he left his farm, and disputed by the landlord.

The dispute had gone on for two years.  The Squire’s law-costs had long since swallowed up the original money in dispute.