at its feet,
the white water stretched like a gleaming eye.

There wasn't a tree Winn hadn't climbed or an inch he hadn't explored,
fought over and played on. He wanted quite horribly to come back to it
again, it was as if there were roots from the very soil in him tugging
at his menaced life.

His mother advanced across the lawn to meet him. She wore a very old
blue serge dress and a black and white check cap which looked as if it
had been discarded by a jockey.

In one hand she held a trowel and in the other a parcel of spring bulbs.
She gave Winn the side of her hard brown cheek to kiss and remarked,
"You've just come in time to help me with these bulbs. Every one of
them must be got in this afternoon. Philip has left us--your father
threw a watering can at him. I can't think what's happened to the men
nowadays, they don't seem to be able to stand anything, and I've sent
Davis into the village to buy ducks. He ought to have been back long ago
if it was only ducks, but probably it's a girl at the mill as well."

Winn looked at the bulbs with deep distaste. "Hang it all, Mother," he
objected, "it's such a messy day for planting bulbs!" "Nonsense," said
Lady Staines firmly, "I presume you wash your hands before dinner, don't
you, you can get the dirt off then? It's a perfect day for bulbs as
you'd know if you had the ghost of country sense in you. There's another
trowel in the small greenhouse, get it and begin." Winn strode off to
the greenhouse smiling; he had had an instinctive desire to get home, he
wanted hard sharp talk that he could answer as if it were a Punch and
Judy show.

In his married life he had had to put aside the free expression of his
thoughts; you couldn't hit out all round if the other person wouldn't
hit back and started whining. Every member of the Staines family had
been brought up on the tradition of combative speech, the bleakest of
personalities found its nest there. Sometimes, of course, you got too
much of it. Sir Peter and Charles were noisy and James and Dolores were
apt to be brutally rough. They were all vehement but there were
different shades in their ability. Winn got through the joints in their
armor as easily as milk slips into a glass. It was Lady Staines and Winn
who were the deadly fighters.

They fought the others with careless ease, but they fought each other
watchfully with fixed eyes and ready implacable brains.

It was difficult to say what they fought for but it was