owing himself with an
air of resignation into a low arm-chair, and taking out a pipe.
'Won't you smoke, Chicksands?'

'Thank you, I've had my morning's allowance. Hullo! Who did that?
What an awfully fine thing!'

For suddenly, behind the Squire's head, Chicksands had become aware
of an easel, and on it a charcoal sketch, life-size, of a boy, who
seemed about eighteen or nineteen, in cricketing dress.

The Squire looked round.

'What, that sketch of Desmond? Haven't you seen it? Yes, it's jolly
good. I got Orpen to do it in July.'

Now that Sir Henry had once perceived the drawing it seemed to him
to light up the whole place. The dress was the dress of the Eton
Eleven; there was just a suggestion of pale blue in the sash round
the waist. But the whole impression was Greek in its manly freedom
and beauty; above all in its sacrifice of all useless detail to one
broad and simple effect. Youth, eager, strong, self-confident, with
its innocent parted lips, and its steadfast eyes looking out over
the future--the drawing stood there as the quintessence, the
embodiment, of a whole generation. So might the young Odysseus have
looked when he left his mother on his first journey to hunt the boar
with his kinsfolk on Mount Parnassus. And with such an air had
hundreds of thousands of English boys gone out on a deadlier venture
since the great war began, with a like intensity of will, a like
merry scorn of fate.

Sir Henry was conscious of a lump in his throat. He had lost his
youngest son in the retreat from Mons, and two nephews on the Somme.

'It's wonderful,' he said, not very clearly. 'I envy you such a
possession.'

The Squire made no reply. He sat with his long body hunched up in
the deep chair, a pair of brooding eyes fixed on his visitor.

'Well, what is it?' he said again, in a voice that was barely civil.

CHAPTER II

Sir Henry had been talking some time. The Squire had not interrupted
him much, but the papers which Sir Henry had presented to him from
time to time--Government communications, Committee reports, and the
like--were mostly lying on the floor, where, after a perfunctory
glance at them, he had very quickly dropped them.

'Well, that's our case,' said Sir Henry at last, thrusting his hands
into his pockets and leaning back in his chair, 'and I assure you
we've taken a great deal of trouble about it. We shouldn't ask you
or anybody else to do these things if it wasn't vitally necessary
for