“Oh, nonsense!  You must go on with it, that’s all!”

Felix turned so that he could look at her.  She was moving round the room now, meticulously adjusting the framed photographs of her family that were the only decoration of the walls.  How formal, chiselled, and delicate her face, yet how almost fanatically decisive!  How frail and light her figure, yet how indomitably active!  And the memory assailed him of how, four years ago, she had defeated double pneumonia without having a doctor, simply by lying on her back.  ‘She leaves trouble,’ he thought, ’until it’s under her nose, then simply tells it that it isn’t there.  There’s something very English about that.’

She was chasing a bluebottle now with a little fan made of wire, and, coming close to Felix, said: 

“Have you seen these, darling?  You’ve only to hit the fly and it kills him at once.”

“But do you ever hit the fly?”

“Oh, yes!” And she waved the fan at the bluebottle, which avoided it without seeming difficulty.

“I can’t bear hurting them, but I don’t like flies.  There!”

The bluebottle flew out of the window behind Felix and in at the one that was not behind him.  He rose.

“You ought to rest before tea, Mother.”

He felt her searching him with her eyes, as if trying desperately to find something she might bestow upon or do for him.

“Would you like this wire—­”

With a feeling that he was defrauding love, he turned and fled.  She would never rest while he was there!  And yet there was that in her face which made him feel a brute to go.

Passing out of the house, sunk in its Monday hush, no vestige of a Bigwig left, Felix came to that new-walled mound where the old house of the Moretons had been burned ’by soldiers from Tewkesbury and Gloucester,’ as said the old chronicles dear to the heart of Clara.  And on the wall he sat him down.  Above, in the uncut grass, he could see the burning blue of a peacock’s breast, where the heraldic bird stood digesting grain in the repose of perfect breeding, and below him gardeners were busy with the gooseberries.  ‘Gardeners and the gooseberries of the great!’ he thought.  ’Such is the future of our Land.’  And he watched them.  How methodically they went to work!  How patient and well-done-for they looked!  After all, was it not the ideal future?  Gardeners, gooseberries, and the great!  Each of the three content in that station of life into which—!  What more could a country want?  Gardeners, gooseberries, and the great!  The phrase had a certain hypnotic value.  Why trouble?  Why fuss?  Gardeners, gooseberries, and the great!  A perfect land!  A land dedicate to the week-end!  Gardeners, goose—!  And suddenly he saw that he was not alone.  Half hidden by the angle of the wall, on a stone of the foundations, carefully preserved and nearly embedded in the nettles which Clara had allowed to grow because