and building.  In Bettina Vanderpoel’s imagination the First Man held powerful and moving sway.  It was he whom she always saw.  In history, as a child at school, she had understood and drawn close to him.  There was always a First Man behind all that one saw or was told, one who was the fighter, the human thing who snatched weapons and tools from stones and trees and wielded them in the carrying out of the thought which was his possession and his strength.  He was the God made human; others waited, without knowledge of their waiting, for the signal he gave.  A man like others—­with man’s body, hands, and limbs, and eyes—­the moving of a whole world was subtly altered by his birth.  One could not always trace him, but with stone axe and spear point he had won savage lands in savage ways, and so ruled them that, leaving them to other hands, their march towards less savage life could not stay itself, but must sweep on; others of his kind, striking rude harps, had so sung that the loud clearness of their wild songs had rung through the ages, and echo still in strains which are theirs, though voices of to-day repeat the note of them.  The First Man, a Briton stained with woad and hung with skins, had tilled the luscious greenness of the lands richly rolling now within hedge boundaries.  The square church towers rose, holding their slender corner spires above the trees, as a result of the First Man, Norman William.  The thought which held its place, the work which did not pass away, had paid its First Man wages; but beauties crumbling, homes falling to waste, were bitter things.  The First Man, who, having won his splendid acres, had built his home upon them and reared his young and passed his possession on with a proud heart, seemed but ill treated.  Through centuries the home had enriched itself, its acres had borne harvests, its trees had grown and spread huge branches, full lives had been lived within the embrace of the massive walls, there had been loves and lives and marriages and births, the breathings of them made warm and full the very air.  To Betty it seemed that the land itself would have worn another face if it had not been trodden by so many springing feet, if so many harvests had not waved above it, if so many eyes had not looked upon and loved it.

She passed through variations of the rural loveliness she had seen on her way from the station to the Court, and felt them grow in beauty as she saw them again.  She came at last to a village somewhat larger than Stornham and marked by the signs of the lack of money-spending care which Stornham showed.  Just beyond its limits a big park gate opened on to an avenue of massive trees.  She stopped and looked down it, but could see nothing but its curves and, under the branches, glimpses of a spacious sweep of park with other trees standing in groups or alone in the sward.  The avenue was unswept and untended, and here and there boughs broken off by wind.