“What are you going to do with yourself, Tim?” asked Sara one day, as he sprawled in blissful indolence on the great bearskin in front of her fire, pulling happily at a beloved old pipe.

“Do with myself?” he repeated.  “What do you mean?  I’m doing very comfortably just at present”—­glancing round him appreciatively.

“I mean—­what are you going to be?  Aren’t you going to enter any profession?”

Tim sat up suddenly, removing his pipe from his mouth.

“No,” he said shortly.

“But why not?  You can’t slack about here for ever, doing nothing.  I should have thought you would have gone into the Army, like your father.”

His blue eyes hardened.

“That’s what I wanted to do,” he said gruffly.  “But the mother wouldn’t hear of it.”

Sara could sense the pain in his suddenly roughened tones.

“But why?  You’d make a splendid soldier, Tim”—­eyeing his long length affectionately.

“I should have loved it,” he said wistfully.  “I wanted it more than anything.  But mother worried so frightfully whenever I suggested the idea that I had to give it up.  I’m to learn to be a landowner and squire and all that sort of tosh instead.”

“But that could come later.”

Tim shrugged his shoulders.

“Of course it could.  But mother refused point-blank to let me go to Sandhurst.  So now, unless a war crops up—­and it doesn’t look as though there’s much chance of that!—­I’m out of the running.  But if it ever does, Sara”—­he laid his hand eagerly on her knee—­“I swear I’ll be one of the first to volunteer.  I was a fool to give in to the mother over the matter, only she was simply making herself ill about it, and, of course, I couldn’t stand that.”

Sara wondered why Mrs. Durward should have interfered to prevent her son from following what was obviously his natural bent.  It would have seemed almost inevitable that, as a soldier’s son, he should enter one or other of the Services, and instead, here he was, stranded in a little country backwater, simply eating his heart out.  Mentally she determined to broach the subject to Elisabeth as soon as an opportunity presented itself; but for the moment she skillfully drew the conversation away from what was evidently a sore subject, and suggested that Tim should accompany her into Fallowdene, where she had an errand at the post office.  He assented eagerly, with a shake of his broad shoulders as though to rid himself of the disagreeable burden of his thoughts.

From the window of his wife’s sitting-room Major Durward watched the two as they started on their way to the village, evidently on the best of terms with one another, a placid smile spreading beneficently over his face as they vanished round the corner of the shrubbery.

“Anything in it, do you think?” he asked, seeing that Elisabeth’s gaze had pursued the same course.

“It’s impossible to say,” she answered quietly.  “Tim imagines himself to be falling in love, I don’t doubt; but at twenty-two a boy imagines himself in love with half the girls he meets.”