and do a bit of hunting too,
and we'll have house-parties, and get a little golf in between whiles. It
will be like old times."

Yeovil looked at his wife and laughed.

"Who was that old fellow who used to hunt his hounds regularly through
the fiercest times of the great Civil War? There is a picture of him, by
Caton Woodville, I think, leading his pack between King Charles's army
and the Parliament forces just as some battle was going to begin. I have
often thought that the King must have disliked him rather more than he
disliked the men who were in arms against him; they at least cared, one
way or the other. I fancy that old chap would have a great many
imitators nowadays, though, when it came to be a question of sport
against soldiering. I don't know whether anyone has said it, but one
might almost assert that the German victory was won on the golf-links of
Britain."

"I don't see why you should saddle one particular form of sport with a
special responsibility," protested Cicely.

"Of course not," said Yeovil, "except that it absorbed perhaps more of
the energy and attention of the leisured class than other sports did, and
in this country the leisured class was the only bulwark we had against
official indifference. The working classes had a big share of the
apathy, and, indirectly, a greater share of the responsibility, because
the voting power was in their hands. They had not the leisure, however,
to sit down and think clearly what the danger was; their own industrial
warfare was more real to them than anything that was threatening from the
nation that they only knew from samples of German clerks and German
waiters."

"In any case," said Cicely, "as regards the hunting, there is no Civil
War or national war raging just now, and there is no immediate likelihood
of one. A good many hunting seasons will have to come and go before we
can think of a war of independence as even a distant possibility, and in
the meantime hunting and horse-breeding and country sports generally are
the things most likely to keep Englishmen together on the land. That is
why so many men who hate the German occupation are trying to keep field
sports alive, and in the right hands. However, I won't go on arguing.
You and I always think things out for ourselves and decide for ourselves,
which is much the best way in the long run."

Cicely slipped away to her writing-room to make final arrangements over
the telephone for the all-i