Jervaise shrugged his shoulders.  “It’s all so infernally complicated by this affair of Brenda’s,” he said.

Yet it has seemed simple enough to him, I reflected, an hour before.  “Kick him and bring her home,” had been his ready solution of the difficulties he thought were before us.  Evidently Anne’s behaviour during our talk at the farm had had a considerable effect upon his opinions.  That, and the moon.  I feel strongly inclined to include the moon—­lazily declining now towards the ambush of a tumulus-shaped hill, crowned, as is the manner of that country, with a pert little top-knot of trees.

“Complicated or simplified?” I suggested.

“Complicated; damnably complicated,” he replied irritably.  “Brenda’s a little fool.  It isn’t as if she were in earnest.”

“Then you don’t honestly believe that she’s in love with Banks?” I asked, remembering his “I don’t know.  How can any one know,” of a few minutes earlier.

“She’s so utterly unreliable—­in every way,” he equivocated.  “She always has been.  She isn’t the least like the rest of us.”

“Don’t you count yourself as another exception?” I asked.

“Not in that way, Brenda’s way,” he said.  “She’s scatter-brained; you can’t get round that.  Going off after the dance in that idiotic way.  It’s maddening.”

“Well, there are two questions that must be resolved before we can get any further,” I commented.  “The first is whether your sister has gone back—­she may have been safe in bed for the last hour and a half for all we know.  And the second is whether she is honestly in love with Banks.  From what I’ve heard of him, I should think it’s very likely,” I added thoughtfully.

Jervaise had his hands in his pockets and was staring up at the moon.  “He’s not a bad chap in some ways,” he remarked, “but there’s no getting over the fact that he’s our chauffeur.”

I saw that.  No badge could be quite so disgraceful in the eyes of the Jervaises as the badge of servitude.  Our talk there, by the wood, had begun to create around us all the limitations of man’s world.  I was forgetting that we were moving in the free spaces of a planetary republic.  And then I looked up and saw the leaning moon, whimsically balanced on the very crown of the topknot that gave a touch of impudence to the pudding-basin hill.

“What’s the name of that hill?” I asked.

He looked at it absently for a moment before he said, “The people about here call it ‘Jervaise Clump.’  It’s a landmark for miles.”

There was no getting away from it.  The Jervaises had conquered all this land and labelled it.  I watched the sharp edge of the tree-clump slowly indenting the rounded back of the moon; and it seemed to me that Jervaise-Clump was the solid permanent thing; the moon a mere incident of the night.

“Oh!  Lord!  Lord!  What bosh it all is!” I exclaimed.

“All what?” Jervaise asked sharply.