“Hold your infernal tongue, Sir!” shouted Sir Peter. “What do I have ’em for? I have ’em here to expose them! That’s why – I just let them try it on, and then hold them up to ridicule! Do you find I ever pay the least attention to ’em, Sarah?” he demanded from his wife.

“Not as a rule,” Lady Staines admitted, “unless you’re very bad indeed, and then you do as you like directly the pain has stopped.”

“Well, why shouldn’t I!” said Sir Peter triumphantly. “Once I get rid of the pain I can do as I like. When I’ve got red hot needles eating into my toes, am I likely to like anything? Of course not, you may just as well take medicine then as anything else, but as to taking orders from a pack of ill-bred bumpkins, full of witch magic as a dog of fleas, I see myself! Don’t stand grinning there, Charles, like a dirty, shock-headed barmaid’s dropped hair pin! I won’t stand it! I can’t see why all my sons should have thin legs, neither you nor I, Sarah, ever went about like a couple of spilikin’s. I call it indecent! Why don’t you get something inside ’em, Charles, eh? No stamina, that’s what it is! Everybody going to the dogs in motor cars with manicure girls out of their parents’ pockets – ! Why don’t you answer me, Charles, when I speak to you?”

“Nobody can answer you when you keep roaring like a deuced megaphone,” said Charles wearily. “Let’s hear what the chap’s got to say for himself, Mater.”

Lady Staines read Winn’s letter out loud in a dry voice without expression; it might have been an account of a new lawn mower which she held beneath it.

“I think that’s all,” said his mother.

“What!” shouted Sir Peter. He had never shouted quite like this before. Charles groaned and buried his head in his hands. Even Lady Staines looked up from the lawn mower’s letter, which she had placed on the top of Winn’s; the medicine bottles sprang from the table and fell back again sufficiently shaken for the next dose.

“Do you mean to tell me!” cried Sir Peter in a quieter voice, “that that little piece of dandelion fluff – that baggage – that city fellow’s half baked, peeled onion of a minx is going to desert her husband? That’s what I call it – desertion! What does she want to go back to her people for? She must go with him! She must go to Davos! She shall go to Davos! if I have to take her there by the hair! I never heard of anything so outrageous in my life! What becomes of domesticity? where’s family life? That’s what I want to know! and is Winn such a milk and water noodle that he’s going to sit down under it and say ‘Thank you!’ Not that I think he needs to go to Davos for a moment, mind you. Let him come here and have a nice quiet time with me, that’s what he wants.”

“That’s all very well, Father,” said Charles. “But what you mean is you don’t want to fork out! If the chap’s told to go to Davos, he’s got to go to Davos, and it’s his own look-out whether he takes his wife with him or not. Consumption isn’t a joke, and I tell you plainly that if you don’t help him when he’s got a chance, you needn’t expect me to come to the funeral. No flowers and coffins and beloved sons on tombstones, are going to make me move an inch. It’ll be just the same to me as if you’d shoved him under with your own hand, and that’s all I’ve got to say, and it’s no use blowing the roof off about it!”

“You’d better go now, Charles,” said Lady Staines quietly.

When Sir Peter had finished saying what he thought of Charles and what he intended to do to the entail, Lady Staines gave him his medicine.

“Look here, Peter,” she said, “this is a bad business about our boy.”

Sir Peter met her eyes and nodded.

“Yes,” he agreed, “a damned bad business!”

“We’d better get him off,” she added after a moment’s pause.

“It’s all nonsense,” grumbled Sir Peter, “and I told you from the first you ought never to have let him marry that girl. Her father’s the poorest tenant I ever had, soft-headed, London vermin! He doesn’t know anything about manure – and he’ll never learn. I shall cut down all his trees as soon as I’m about again. As for the girl, keep her out of my sight or I’ll wring her neck. I ought to have done it long ago. How much does he want?”

“Let’s make it three hundred,” Lady Staines said. “He may as well be comfortable.”

“Pouring money into a sieve,” grumbled Sir Peter. “Send for the doctor and bring me the medical dictionary. I may as well see what it says about consumption, and don’t mention the word when Winn’s about. I will have tact! If you’d used common or garden tact in this house before, that marriage would never have taken place. I sit here simmering with it day in and day out and everybody else goes about giving the whole show away! If it hadn’t been for my tact Charles would have married that manicure girl years ago. Bring me my check-book. It’s nothing but a school-boy’s lark, this going to Davos. Why consumption’s a pin-prick compared to gout! No pain – use of both legs – sanguine disposition. Where the hell’s that medical dictionary? Ah, it’s there, is it – then why the devil didn’t you give it me before?”

Sir Peter read solemnly for a few minutes, and then flung the book on the floor.

“Bosh!” he cried angrily. “All old woman’s nonsense. Can’t tell what’s going on inside a pair of bellows – can they? Then why make condemned asses of themselves, and say they can! Don’t tell Charles I’ve written this check – he’s the most uncivil rascal we’ve got.”

It was odd how Winn looked forward to seeing Staines; he couldn’t remember ever having paid much attention to the scenery before; he had always liked the bare backs of the downs behind the house where he used to exercise the horses, and the turf was short and smelt of thyme; and of course the shooting was good and the house stood well; but he hadn’t thought about it till now, any more than he thought about his braces.

He decided to walk up from the station. There was a short cut through the fields and then you came on the Court suddenly, over-looking a sheet of water.

It was a still November day, colorless and sodden. The big elms were as dark as wet haystacks and the woods huddled dispiritedly in a vague mist.

The trees broke to the right of the Court and the house rose up like a gigantic silver ghost.

It was a battered old Tudor building with an air of not having been properly cleaned; blackened and weather-soaked, unconscionably averse from change, it had held its own for four hundred years.

The stones looked as if they were made out of old moonlight and thin December sunshine. A copse of small golden trees, aspen and silver birches made a pale screen of light beside the house and at its feet, the white water stretched like a gleaming eye.

There wasn’t a tree Winn hadn’t climbed or an inch he hadn’t explored, fought over and played on. He wanted quite horribly to come back to it again, it was as if there were roots from the very soil in him tugging at his menaced life.

His mother advanced across the lawn to meet him. She wore a very old blue serge dress and a black and white check cap which looked as if it had been discarded by a jockey.

In one hand she held a trowel and in the other a parcel of spring bulbs. She gave Winn the side of her hard brown cheek to kiss and remarked, “You’ve just come in time to help me with these bulbs. Every one of them must be got in this afternoon. Philip has left us – your father threw a watering can at him. I can’t think what’s happened to the men nowadays, they don’t seem to be able to stand anything, and I’ve sent Davis into the village to buy ducks. He ought to have been back long ago if it was only ducks, but probably it’s a girl at the mill as well.”