I am bound to say she had been very decent to me over it all.  She wants me to do some of the housekeeping—­and she has actually made father consent to my helping at the hospital every afternoon.  Of course I am awfully glad about that.  I shall bicycle over.

’But all the same it is very odd, and perhaps you and I had better consider what it may mean.  I know from Broomie herself that she gave notice yesterday—­and now she is going to stay.  And I know from Forest that father called him up when it was quite dark, between three and four in the morning—­Mrs. Forest thought the Germans had come when she heard the knocking—­and asked him to come with him and undo the gates.  Forest told me that he would have had nothing whatever to do with closing them, nor with anything ’agin the Government!  He’s a staunch old soul, is Forest.  So when father told him what he wanted, he didn’t know what to make of it.  However, they both groped their way through the fog, which was thick on the other side of the park, and set to at the gates.  Forest says it was an awful business to get everything cleared away.  Father and Gregson had made an uncommonly good job of it.  If Gregson had put in work like that on his own hedges and gates, Forest says he mightn’t have been kicked out!  It took them ages getting the barbed wire cleared away, because they hadn’t any proper nippers.  Father took off his coat, and worked like a navvy, and Forest hoisted him up to get at the wire along the wall.  Forest says he was determined to leave nothing!  “And I believe, Miss, the Squire was very glad of the fog—­because there couldn’t be any one prying around.”

’For it seems to be really true that the village has been in a state of ferment, and that they had determined to free the gates and let in the Council plough.  Perley was seen talking to a lot of men on the green last night.  I met him myself this morning after breakfast near the gates, and he confessed he had been there already—­early.  I expect he came to reconnoitre and take back the news.  Rather calm, for one of father’s own men!  But that’s the new spirit, Dezzy.  We’re not going to be allowed to have it all our own way any more.  Well, thank goodness, I don’t mind.  At least, there is something in me that minds.  I suppose it’s one’s forbears.  But the greater part of me wants a lot of change—­and there are often and often times when I wish I’d been born in the working-class and was just struggling upwards with them, and sharing all their hopes and dreams for “after the war.”  Well, why shouldn’t I?  I’m going to set Broomie on to some of the cottages in the village—­not that she’ll want setting on—­but after all, it’s I who know the people.

’But that’s by the way.  The point is why did father give in?  Evidently because Broomie gave notice, and he couldn’t bear the idea of parting with her.  Of course Alice—­and Margaret too, to some extent—­are