profit-making and food-producing concern, as it should have been, it
was a bye-word for bad management and neglected land. She did not
pretend to know much about it yet; but what she did know roused her.
England was at grips with a brutal foe. The only weapon that could
defeat her was famine--the sloth and waste of her own sons. This
woman, able, energetic, a lover of her country, could not conceal
her scorn for such a fatal incompetence. Naturally, in talking to
the eldest son, she made the agent her scapegoat for the sins of the
owner. The Squire's responsibility was carefully masked. But Aubrey
Mannering perfectly understood what she would be at. She was a
clever woman who wanted things improved. Well, let her improve
them. It did not matter to him.

But she appeared to him as a somewhat special type of the modern
woman, with her advanced education and her clear brain; and for a
time he observed her curiously. The graceful dress, pale blue with
touches of black, which exactly became her fair skin, the bright
gold of her hair, and the pleasant homeliness of her face--her
general aspect indeed--attracted him greatly. She might know Greek;
at heart, he believed, she was a good housewife; and when she
incidentally mentioned Dutch relations, he seemed to see her with a
background of bright pots and pans, mopping tiled floors.

But presently he ceased to pay much attention to her. His dreamy
sense became aware of the scene as a whole; the long table; his
father's fantastic figure at the head of it; Alice Gaddesden
elaborately dressed and much made up on the one side, his sister
Margaret in a high black gown, erect and honest, on the other;
Desmond and Pamela together, chatting and chaffing with the Rector.
It was the room so familiar to his childhood and youth, with the
family pictures, the Gainsborough full-length of his very plain
great-grandmother in white satin at the end, two or three Vandyck
school-portraits of seventeenth-century Mannerings, and the
beautiful Hogarth head--their best possession--that was so like
Pamela. The furniture of the room was of many different
dates--incongruous, shabby, and on the whole ugly. The Mannerings of
the past had not been an artistic lot.

Nor had the room--the house indeed--many tender associations for
him. His childhood had not been very happy. He had never got on with
his father, and his mother, who had been the victim of various long
illnesses during his boyhood, had never