reddened the great heads
of the oaks, and set the sycamore buds shining like jewels in the
pale blue. There was an endless chatter and whirr of wood-pigeons in
the high tree-tops, and underfoot the anemones and violets were busy
pushing their gentle way through the dead leaves of autumn. The
Squire's beechwoods were famous in the neighbourhood, and he was
still proud of them; though for many years past they had gone
unnoticed to decay, and were in some places badly diseased.

To Elizabeth, in an artistic mood--the mood which took her in town
to see exhibitions of Brabazon or Steer--the woods were fairyland.
The high slender oak of the middle wood, the spreading oak that
lived on its borders, the tall columnar beech feathering into the
sky, its grey stem shining as though by some magic property in the
beautiful forest twilight--the gleams and the shadows, the sounds
and scents of the woodland world--she could talk or write about
these things as poetically, and as sincerely, as any other educated
person when put to it; but on this occasion, it has to be said
frankly, she was thinking of nothing but aeroplanes and artillery
waggons. And she had by now developed a kind of _flair_ in the
woods, which was the astonishment of Captain Dell, himself no mean
forester. As far as ash was concerned, she was a hunter on the
trail. She could distinguish an ash tree yards ahead through a mixed
or tangled wood, and track it unerringly. The thousand ash that she,
and the old park-keepers set on by her, had already found for the
Government, were nothing to what she meant to find. The Squire's
woods, some of which she had not yet explored at all, were as mines
to her in which she dug for treasure--for the timber that might save
her country.

Captain Dell delighted in her. He had already taught her a great
deal, and was now drilling her in the skilled arts of measurement
and valuation. The Squire, in stupefaction, watched her at work with
pole and tape, measuring, noting, comparing. Had it been any one
else he would have been bored and contemptuous. But the novelty of
the thing and the curious fact that the lady who looked up his Greek
references was also the lady who was measuring the trees, kept him a
half-unwilling but still fascinated spectator of her proceedings.

In the midst of them Sir Henry Chicksands appeared, making his way
through the thick undergrowth. Elizabeth threw a hasty look at the
Squire. This was the first time the