Margaret Shenstone was particularly stirred.

“What friends we shall be!” she said presently, with a long, quivering breath—­“I mean America and England.  Friends for ever!  And we quarrelled once.  That’s so wonderful.  That shows good does come out of evil!”

“I should jolly well think so,” said Ellesborough, looking kindly at the young girl.  “Why, if it hadn’t been for this war, millions of these boys who are coming over now would never have seen England or Europe at all.  It’ll change the face of everything!”

“Only we must play up,” said the vicar anxiously.  “We must get rid of our abominable shyness, and let your people really see how we really welcome them.”

Rachel gave a little defiant shake of the head.

“America’s got to thank us, too!” she said, with a challenging look at Ellesborough.  “We’ve borne it for four years.  Now it’s your turn!”

“Well, here we are,” said Ellesborough quietly, “up to the neck.  But—­of course—­don’t thank us.  It’s our business just as much as yours.”

The talk dropped a moment, and Janet took advantage of it to bring in coffee as a finish to the meal.  Under cover of the slight bustle, Ellesborough said to Rachel, in a voice no longer meant for the table,—­

“Could you spare me a letter sometimes, Miss Henderson—­at the front?”

He had both elbows on the table, and was playing with a cigarette.  There was nothing the least patronizing or arrogant in his manner.  But there was a male note in it—­perhaps a touch of self-confidence—­which ruffled her.

“Oh, I am a bad letter-writer,” she said, as she got up from the table.  “Shall we go and look at the cows?”

They all went out into the warm September night.  Ellesborough followed Rachel, cigarette in hand, his strong mouth twisting a little.  The night was almost cloudless.  The pale encircling down, patched at intervals with dark hanging woods, lay quiet under a sky full of faint stars.  The scent of the stubblefields, of the great corn-stack just beyond the farmyard, of the big barn so full that the wide wooden doors could not be closed, was mingled with the strong ammonia smells of the farm-yard, and here and there with the sweetness left in the evening air by the chewing cows on their passage to the cow-house on the farther side of the yard.

Rachel led the way to the cow-house—­a vast fifteenth-century barn, with an interlacing forest of timber in its roof, where the six cows stood ranged, while Janet and the two land lassies, with Hastings the bailiff to help them, were changing the litter and filling up the racks with hay.  Rachel went along the line pointing out the beauties of each separate beast to Ellesborough, and caressing two little calves whom Jenny was feeding by hand.  Ellesborough was amused by her technical talk and her proprietor’s airs.  It seemed to him a kind of play-acting, but it fascinated him.  Janet had brought in a