'

Chicksands' gesture was one of despair.

Then they hurried away from the War Office together.

CHAPTER XV

It was afternoon at Mannering.

Elizabeth was walking home from the village through the park. Still
the same dry east-wind weather--very cold in the wind, very warm in
the sun. If the German offensive began while these fine days held,
they would have the luck of weather as we had never had it. Think of
the drenching rains and winds of the Passchendaele attack! In the
popular mind the notion of 'a German God' was taking actual concrete
shape. A huge and monstrous form, sitting on a German hill, plotting
with the Kaiser, and ordering the weather precisely as the Kaiser
wished--it was thus that English superstition, aided by Imperial
speeches and telegrams, began to be haunted.

Yet the world was still beautiful--the silvery stems of the trees,
the flitting of the birds, the violet carpets underfoot. On the
fighting line itself there was probably a new crop of poets, hymning
the Spring with Death for listener, as Julian Grenfell and Rupert
Brooke had hymned it, in that first year of the war that seems now
an eternity behind us.

Moving along a path converging on her own, Elizabeth perceived the
Squire. For the first time that morning he had put off their joint
session, and she had not seen him all day. Her mind was now always
uneasily aware of him--aware, too, of some change in him, for which
in some painful way she felt herself responsible. He had grown
strangely tame and placable, and it was generally noticed that he
looked older. Yet he was more absorbed than ever in the details of
Greek research and the labour of his catalogue. Only, of an evening,
he read the _Times_ for a couple of hours, generally in complete
silence, while Elizabeth and Mrs. Gaddesden talked and knitted.

An extraordinary softness--an extraordinary compassion--was steadily
invading Elizabeth's mind in regard to him. Something suggested to
her that he had come into life maimed of some essential element of
being, possessed by his fellow-men, and that he was now conscious of
the lack, as a Greek Faun might be conscious of the difference
between his life and that of struggling and suffering men. Nothing,
indeed, could less suggest the blithe nature-life which Greek
imagination embodied in the Faun, than the bizarre and restless
aspect of the Squire. This spare white-haired man, with his tempers
and irritations, was far indeed