‘My dear, it will always be necessary to grow grass and corn.’

’By no means; depend upon it.  Such things will be cultivated by chemical processes.  There will not be one inch left to nature; the very oceans will somehow be tamed, the snow-mountains will be levelled.  And with nature will perish art.  What has a hungry Demos to do with the beautiful?’

Mrs. Eldon sighed gently.

‘I shall not see it.’

Her eyes dreamed upon the soft-swaying boughs of a young chestnut.  Hubert was watching her face; its look and the meaning implied in her words touched him profoundly.

‘Mother!’ he said under his breath.

‘My dear?’

He drew nearer to her and just stroked with his fingers the silver lines which marked the hair on either side of her brows.  He could see that she trembled and that her lips set themselves in hard self-conquest.

‘What do you wish me to do when we have left the Manor?’

His own voice was hurried between two quiverings of the throat; his mother’s only whispered in reply.

‘That is for your own consideration, Hubert.’

‘With your counsel, mother.’

‘My counsel?’

‘I ask it I will follow it.  I wish to be guided by you.’

He knelt by her, and his mother pressed his head against her bosom.

Later, she asked—­

‘Did you call also on the Walthams?’

He shook his head.

’Should you not do so, dear?

‘I think that must be later.’

The subject was not pursued.

The next day was Saturday.  In the afternoon Hubert took a walk which had been his favourite one ever since he could remember, every step of the way associated with recollections of childhood, boyhood, or youth.  It was along the lane which began in a farmyard close by the Manor and climbed with many turnings to the top of Stanbury Hill.  This was ever the first route re-examined by his brother Godfrey and himself on their return from school at holiday-time.  It was a rare region for bird-nesting, so seldom was it trodden save by a few farm-labourers at early morning or when the day’s work was over.  Hubert passed with a glance of recognition the bramble in which he had found his first spink’s nest, the shadowed mossy bank whence had fluttered the hapless wren just when the approach of two prowling youngsters should have bidden her keep close.  Boys on the egg-trail are not wont to pay much attention to the features of the country; but Hubert remembered that at a certain meadow-gate he had always rested for a moment to view the valley, some mute presage of things unimagined stirring at his heart.  Was it even then nineteenth century?  Not for him, seeing that the life of each of us reproduces the successive ages of the world.  Belwick, roaring a few miles away, was but an isolated black patch on the earth’s beauty, not, as he now understood it, a malignant