een hundred acres that formed the little Becket demesne. Of
agricultural laborers proper--that vexed individual so much in the air,
so reluctant to stay on 'the Land,' and so difficult to house when he was
there, there were fortunately none, so that it was possible for Stanley,
whose wife meant him to 'put up' for the Division, and his guests, who
were frequently in Parliament, to hold entirely unbiassed and impersonal
views upon the whole question so long as they were at Becket.

It was beautiful there, too, with the bright open fields hedged with
great elms, and that ever-rich serenity of its grass and trees. The
white house, timbered with dark beams in true Worcestershire fashion, and
added-to from time to time, had preserved, thanks to a fine architect, an
old-fashioned air of spacious presidency above its gardens and lawns. On
the long artificial lake, with innumerable rushy nooks and water-lilies
and coverture of leaves floating flat and bright in the sun, the
half-tame wild duck and shy water-hens had remote little worlds, and flew
and splashed when all Becket was abed, quite as if the human spirit, with
its monkey-tricks and its little divine flame, had not yet been born.

Under the shade of a copper-beech, just where the drive cut through into
its circle before the house, an old lady was sitting that afternoon on a
campstool. She was dressed in gray alpaca, light and cool, and had on
her iron-gray hair a piece of black lace. A number of Hearth and Home
and a little pair of scissors, suspended by an inexpensive chain from her
waist, rested on her knee, for she had been meaning to cut out for dear
Felix a certain recipe for keeping the head cool; but, as a fact, she sat
without doing so, very still, save that, now and then, she compressed her
pale fine lips, and continually moved her pale fine hands. She was
evidently waiting for something that promised excitement, even pleasure,
for a little rose-leaf flush had quavered up into a face that was colored
like parchment; and her gray eyes under regular and still-dark brows,
very far apart, between which there was no semblance of a wrinkle, seemed
noting little definite things about her, almost unwillingly, as an Arab's
or a Red Indian's eyes will continue to note things in the present,
however their minds may be set on the future. So sat Frances Fleeming
Freeland (nee Morton) waiting for the arrival of her son Felix and her
grandchildren Alan and Nedda.

She