Mannering, with a
cordial ring in his voice, as he introduced his fiancee to
Elizabeth. The two shook hands, and Elizabeth thought the girl's
manner a little stand-off, and wondered why.

The pony had soon been tied up, and the party spread themselves on
the grass of the hill-side; for Holme Wood Hill was a famous point
of view, and the sunny peace of the afternoon invited loitering.
For miles to the eastward spread an undulating chalk plain, its
pale grey or purplish soil showing in the arable fields where the
stubbles were just in process of ploughing, its monotony broken by a
vast wood of oak and beech into which the hill-side ran down--a wood
of historic fame, which had been there when Senlac was fought, had
furnished ship-timber for the Armada, and sheltered many a cavalier
fugitive of the Civil Wars.

The wood indeed, which belonged to the Squire, was a fragment of
things primeval. For generations the trees in it had sprung up,
flourished, and fallen as they pleased. There were corners of it
where the north-west wind sweeping over the bare down above it had
made pathways of death and ruin; sinister places where the fallen or
broken trunks of the great beech trees, as they had crashed
down-hill upon and against each other, had assumed all sorts of
grotesque and phantasmal attitudes, as in a trampled melee of
giants; there were other parts where slender plumed trees, rising
branchless to a great height above open spaces, took the shape from
a distance of Italian stone palms, and gave a touch of southern or
romantic grace to the English midland scene; while at their feet,
the tops of the more crowded sections of the wood lay in close,
billowy masses of leaf, the oaks vividly green, the beeches already
aflame.

'Who says there's a war?' said Captain Chicksands, sinking
luxuriously into a sunny bed of dry leaves, conveniently placed in
front of Elizabeth. 'Miss Bremerton, you and I were, I understand,
at the same University?'

Elizabeth assented.

'Is it your opinion that Universities are any good?--that after the
war there are going to be any Universities?'

'Only those that please the Labour Party!' put in Mannering.

'Oh, I'm not afraid of the Labour Party--awfully good fellows, many
of them. The sooner they make a Government the better. They've got
to learn their lessons like the rest of us. But I do want to know
whether Miss Bremerton thinks Oxford was any _use_--before the
war--and is going to be any u