bit, I'm not rotting now. He had almost four
years of it--almost as long as I had. I'll guarantee it put a
mark on him. It scarred us all. It'll amuse me to dine him and
Val together, and make them talk shop, our own old shop, and see
what the war's done for each of us: three retired veterans,
that's what we shall be, putting our legs under the same
mahogany: three old comrades in arms." He gave his strange,
jarring laugh. "Wonder which of us is scarred deepest?"

CHAPTER II

WANHOPE and Castle Wharton--or, to give them their due order,
Wharton and Wanhope, for Major Clowes' place would have gone
inside the Castle three times over--were the only country
houses in the Reverend James Stafford's parish. The village
of Chilmark--a stone bridge, crossroads, a church with Norman
tower and frondlike Renaissance tracery, and an irregular line
of school, shops, and cottages strung out between the stream and
chalky beech-crested hillside occupied one of those long, winding,
sheltered crannies that mark the beds of watercourses along the
folds of Salisbury Plain. Uplands rose steeply all along it
except on the south, where it widened away into the flats of
Dorsetshire. Wharton overlooked this expanse of hunting country:
a formidable Norman keep, round which, by gradual accretion, a
dwelling-place had grown up, a history of English architecture
and English gardening written in stone and brick and grass and
flowers. One sunny square there was, enclosed between arched
hedges set upon pillars of carpenters' work, which still kept the
design of old Verulam: and Yvonne of the Castle loved its little
turrets and cages of singing birds, and its alleys paved with
burnet, wild thyme, and watermints, which perfume the air most
delightfully, not passed by as the rest, but being trodden upon
and crushed.

Wanhope also, though modest by comparison, had a good deal of
land attached to it, but the Clowes property lay north up the
Plain, where they sowed the headlands with red wheat still as
in the days of Justice Shallow. The shining Mere, a tributary
of the Avon, came dancing down out of these hills: strange
pastoral cliffs of chalk covered with fine sward, and worked by
the hands of prehistoric man into bastions and ramparts that
imitated in verdure the bold sweep of masonry.

Mr. Stafford was a man of sixty, white-haired and of sensitive,
intelligent features. He was a High Churchman, but wore a felt
wideawake in wint