to disorganize the
room, and lay violent and exclusive hold on the spectator.

Elizabeth on returning to her table found the library empty. The
Squire had been called away by his agent and one of the new
officials of the county, and had not yet returned. She expected him
to return in a bad--possibly an outrageous temper. For she gathered
that the summons had something to do with the decree of the County
War Agricultural Committee that fifty acres, at least, of Mannering
Park were to be given back to the plough, which, indeed, had only
ceased to possess them some sixty years before. The Squire had gone
out pale with fury, and she looked anxiously at her work, to see
what there might be in it to form an excuse for a hurricane.

She could find nothing, however, likely to displease a sane man. And
as she was at a standstill till he came back, she slipped an
unfinished letter out of her notebook, and went on with it. It was
to a person whom she addressed as 'my darling Dick.'

'I have now been rather more than a month here. You can't
imagine what a queer place it is, nor what a queer employer I
have struck. There might be no war--as far as Mannering is
concerned. The Squire is always engaged in mopping it out, like
Mrs. Partington. He takes no newspaper, except a rag called the
_Lanchester Mail_, which attacks the Government, the Army--as
far as it dare--and "secret diplomacy." It comes out about once
a week with a black page, because the Censor has been sitting on
it. Desmond Mannering--that's the gunner-son who came on leave a
week ago and is just going off to an artillery camp--and I,
conspire through the butler--who is a dear, and a patriot--to
get the _Times_; but the Squire never sees it. Desmond reads it
in bed in the morning, I read it in bed in the evening, and
Pamela Mannering, Mr. Desmond's twin, comes in last thing, in
her dressing-gown, and steals it.

'I seem indeed to be living in the heart of a whirlwind, for the
Squire is fighting everybody all round, and as he is the least
reticent of men, and I have to write his letters, I naturally,
even by now, know a good deal about him. Shortly put, he is in a
great mess. The estate is riddled with mortgages, which it would
be quite easy to reduce. For instance, there are masses of
timber, crying to be cut. He consults me often in the naivest
way. You remember that I train