All the same here he was, walking his motor cycle up the field road leading to Great End Farm, and looking eagerly about him.  A lonely position, but beautiful!  On the woods behind the house he turned a professional eye.  Fine timber!  The man who was to succeed him at Ralstone would no doubt have the cutting of it.  The farm quadrangle, with its sixteenth century barn, out of which the corn seemed to be actually bursting from various open doors and windows, appeared to him through that glamour which, for the intelligent American, belongs to everything that medieval and Elizabethan England has bequeathed to the England of the present.  He will back himself, he thinks, to plan and build a modern town better than the Britisher—­in any case quicker.  But the mosses and tiles of an old Brookshire barn beat him.

Ellesborough paused at the gate to watch two land lassies carrying pails of milk across the yard towards a prolongation of the farm-house, which he supposed was the dairy.  Just beyond the farm-yard, two great wheat-stacks were visible; while in the hayfields running up to the woods, large hay-stacks, already nearly thatched, showed dimly in the evening light.  And all this was run by women, worked by Women!  Well, American women, so he heard from home, were doing the same in the fields and farms of the States.  It was all part, he supposed, of a world movement, by which, no less than by the war itself, these great years would be for ever remembered.

The farm-house itself, however, seemed to him from the outside a poor, flimsy thing, unworthy of the old farm buildings.  He could see that the walls of it were only a brick thick, and in spite of the pretty curtains, he was struck by the odd feature of the two large windows exactly opposite each other, so that a spectator on either side of the house might look right through it.

“Seems like being in the street.  However, if there’s nobody to look at you, I suppose it don’t matter.”

Then he laughed, for just as he led his motor cycle into the yard, and passed the sitting-room window, he was struck by the appearance of two large sheep, who seemed to be actually in the sitting-room, at its farther end.  They were standing, he presently perceived, upon the steep down beyond the house, on the slope of which the farm was built; which on the southern side of the farm quadrangle came right up to the house wall.  At the same moment he saw a woman inside get up and shoo them from the open window, so that they ran away.

But when Jenny Harberton had admitted him, and he was waiting in the sitting-room, from which the woman he had seen had disappeared, he was in the mood to admire everything.  How nice the two women had made it!  His own rough life, both before and since the war, had only increased a natural instinct for order and seemliness.  The pretty blue paper, the fresh drugget, the photographs on the wall, the flowers, and the delicate neatness of everything delighted him.  He went round looking at the pictures and the few books, perfectly conscious that everything which he saw had a more than common interest for him.  The room seemed to be telling a story—­opening points of view.