out by a winding walk at the back of the inn, behind high box hedges, and came to a noble bowling green, dating from the days of Henry VII. The turf on it was extraordinarily fine and smooth; except in Oxford College Gardens I have never seen such turf, and the shadows of tall trees standing sideways to this beautiful lawn were thrown across it like a delicate drawing. The place was so old and quiet and historical, it sent one into a dream of bygone days; and I was just beginning to see figures in Elizabethan outlines, stooping to their bowls, when David said suddenly-

"You mustn't think too poorly of Dick Harding, you know."

"I wasn't thinking about him at all," I said, annoyed at the disturbance of my daydream.

"Well, you heard what the child said about work. She knows what it is already. An infant like her ought to know about nothing but play. That is what cuts the hearts of parents in those lonely parts of the earth where they have to toil like the beasts for a living. They can face it for themselves, but they want to save their children from it, to give them playtime in their youth; and there's no way to do that but to give them up. Don't you see?

"I don't know anything about parental motives," I said. "It's not to be expected that I should. The proper place

for a child is with its parents, I should have thought, in my grovelling unenlightened way, if you hadn't shown me better. What I do feel concerned about is this: aren't you very likely laying up trouble for yourself by taking on a responsibility that doesn't properly belong to you?"

He did not answer.

"Of course I know it wasn't your your own idea," I added.

"Come and sit down," said

David.

We found seats somewhere, and smoked our pipes in silent peace. The soft green of that wonderful turf was a rest to the mind even more than to the eyes. I was always fond of green; but you have to spend long years in hot countries to know how good it is when you see it again.

"Now I'll explain what you don't realise yet," David went on at length. "Some time ago a hospital nurse was required in our house. Hilda wasn't— very well. She thought herself worse. But we had already had the best advice for her, and what that woman told me was this: If a person gets their own health on their nerves, and doesn't believe the doctor when he says it's only a trifling thing that's wrong, then such a person is very likely to insist that only an operation can work the cure, and if their doctor refuses for his own reasons to operate, they simply go to another."

"Lord, what craziness!" I

said before I thought, and David winced.

"It's an affair of the nerves, of course; and everything concerning the nerves is more or less inexplicable, so the nurse said," he went on patiently. "The mind is so obsessed with its one idea that you can't reach the mind, so argument is useless."

"What rogues these doctors must be!" I said violently, because I was vexed at my own tactlessness. "Fancy taking advantage of people in such a condition! But, of course, the whole region of nerves is a perfect gold-mine to the profession."

66

On the contrary, I think it is rather rough on the doctors, for it puts them in a hole," said David, with that perfect fairness of his which often exasperated me while I admired it. As the nurse explained to me, the doctor knows perfectly well that if he refuses a patient, she not only goes straight to a new doctor, but she does her little best to spoil his reputation among the whole circle of her acquaintance by telling them how completely he misunderstood her case, and they agree with her that he is no better than a boiled owl. Instead of that, he thinks it better to gratify her by some kind of a trifling operation which she believes to be a momentous affair, and 80and so he does."

They seem to think it the only way, but it's not an infallible cure. For this experienced woman told me that there were patients who returned to the charge again and again. In the profession they call them operation mad,' she said."

It made me feel perfectly sick. I hate these morbid developments that have nothing to do with sane normal life and normal people. But in the middle of my disgust I suddenly realised that it had been for David a practical problem; he had been in deadly fear for his wife, lest she should become one of these self-tormented victims. Hilda's face rose before me, that pretty, under-bred face I had always disliked, with glassy blue eyes, wide open, and fair fluffy hair. I ought to have pitied it, but I disliked it more than ever, and pitied David instead.

"Had she no advice to give you, this woman of experience?" I asked him.

According to David, no one ever acted from motives less pure than his own. I often felt myself a cynical worldspotted sort of character beside

him, though I am not more suspicious than most men by nature, I believe.

"Nurse Evans didn't know the Hardings," he remarked, looking at me exactly as if he had read my thoughts. People like David have that way sometimes, and I rose to my feet, uncomfortable.

We went back to the car, and were home half an hour after. I did not go indoors, but stayed outside a while in the gathering dusk. It's an hour I like to be out in.

What a perfect home it looked, the old Hall, so quiet and sheltering! Lights shone from the windows here and there, like beacons to a quiet haven. But there was no peace in that home. For all its outside perfection and skilful arrangement within, it was a hollow place. Poor old David! he had too much money, I reflected. If Hilda had been poverty-stricken to a wholesome extent, and obliged to do something for her living, she wouldn't have grown so selfcentred and morbid. Too much money is the ruin of women, isn't it? But what about the

other woman, Dick Harding's wife? She wasn't suffering from too much money, or overattention to her nerves. Work was the only thing she had plenty of, and it had brought her to the pitch of making over her own child to another woman. But purely from maternal affection and a desire for the child's welfare, as David would have it. Was there ever such rot?

No; clearly money was not the root of this evil, or the want of money. It came from the mistake of two men in allowing two women to take their own way. The women are getting far too much the upper hand in this new world, as they call it. Anybody can see that, and it's all wrong.

I don't care how clever they are so much the worse for us, I privately think!-and I don't care how "magnificent they were in the war, though there is such a song made about it on the platforms. All that is beside the mark. They should never be allowed to get the whip-hand over us; but they are getting it, as any one can see.

the dolls and the dolls' tea-set, which she had all ready in a drawer somewhere, and invited Lina to play with them. Lina remained as solemn as a judge. So we played with them, and ate little crumbs off the plates, and drank little drops from the cups, and made the dolls talk to each other; but Lina remained perfectly stolid. Then Hilda dressed up and came as a visitor to take tea with the dolls, and she conversed gaily with them till Lina said at last, 'Why do you go on like that? It makes you so silly.'

morning when there's a storm brewing."

So Joey fishes, I reflected. God send she doesn't come out shooting with us to-morrow! The mere anticipation of it disturbed me so that I forgot what they were talking about. I had no objection to Joey on the hearth-rug, none whatever, as the firelight played on her creamy neck and outstretched bare arms. But Joey with the guns would be a different proposition altogether. I resolved to ask David not to let her come out.

Selfish, was it? Well, men ought to be selfish, and women ought to be kept in their places. That was the decent old way of things.

When I came out of this meditation they were having a disagreement opposite.

"The child is only shy, Joey. That is perfectly natural. Don't talk rot! "

one Sir Hugh Winder. Each owned a covert on a hillside; these coverts were opposite, but not exactly facing each other, and a stream ran between the two hills. The birds, when shooting began on one hill, were very apt to fly across to the other, so the advantage of shooting these coverts on

"Poor little changeling!" in a deep voice of pity was all he said.

Next day dawned fair. If possible it was as fine as the day before, but no two days are ever really alike, except in the tropics.

What an infinite variety there is in this tiny island! as if to make up for its insignificant size. No Briton really believes England to be small, though he constantly says she is. We seem to have acquired a habit of saying a lot of things which we don't believe; that money is the supreme power, that our insular superiority is a delusion, that good sport is a selfish pastime, that Irishmen should be trusted, and other such rubbish. Perhaps, though, it is only the press that says these things. But people talk out of the newspapers in a way which I don't think they had before the war.

The first pleasure of a shooting morning is that one doesn't look at the paper or one's letters.

This day's shoot was a sort of combined affair between David and a neighbour of his,

David had four guns, and Sir Hugh, I think, had five.

We spent a perfectly satisfactory day. The pheasants were plentiful, and rose impartially on all sides. Or perhaps I thought so, because plenty of them came my way. The light was just what it ought to be for shooting, not glaringly bright, but veiled and sunshiny.

There's nothing like an autumn day in England, when the sun shines. There's nothing to beat the beauty of English woodland glades in October; but to see them aright you need to have a gun in your hand and your eye cocked for a pheasant rocketing across the sky-blue space between tall half-stripped trees. You don't need to go mooning about like one of these trumpery fellows hunting copy, or whatever they call it. I hate sentimentality in the open air. But what I say is, after a morning's fun like this, and when I've been on my day, I can say my prayers with the heart of a boy that night, and thank God for the good sport.

Well, the best of things come to an end, and October days