s doing so. I don't
mean half I say. You're too full of business--you take me up too
quick. What are those papers you've got there?'

Elizabeth's red cheeks showed her taken aback. It was the first time
for weeks that her employer had turned upon her so. She had grown so
accustomed to managing him, to taming the irritable temper that no
one else but she could cope with, and, unconsciously, so proud of
her success, that she was not prepared for this attack. She met it
meekly.

'I have a proposal here to submit to you, from ---- & Co.' (she
named a firm of timber-merchants famous throughout the Midlands).
'There is nothing in it--Captain Dell is certain--that would injure
the estate. You have such masses of timber! And, if you don't sell,
you may find it commandeered. You know what's happened to Lord
Radley?'

The Squire sulkily demanded to be informed. Elizabeth told the
story, standing at his desk, like a clerk making a report. It seemed
to enrage her auditor.

'This _accursed_ war!' he broke out, when she had finished--'it
makes slaves and idiots of us all. It must--it shall end!' And
marching tempestuously up and down, he went off into one of the
pessimist and pacifist harangues to which she was more or less
accustomed. Who would rid the country of a Government that could
neither make peace nor make war?--that foresaw nothing--that was
making life unbearable at home, by a network of senseless
restrictions, while it wasted millions abroad, and in the military
camps! The Labour Party were the only people with a grain of sense.
They at least would try to make peace. Only, when they had made it,
to be governed by them would be even worse than to be governed by
Lloyd George. There was no possible life anywhere for decent quiet
people. And as for the ravaging and ruin of the woods that was going
on all over England--

'The submarine return is worse this week,' said Elizabeth in a low
voice.

She had gone to her own table and was sitting there till the
hurricane should pass over. There was in her a fresh and chafing
sense of the obstacles laid in her path--the path of the scientific
and successful organizer--by the Squire's perversities. It was not
as though he were a pacifist by conviction, religious or other. She
had seen him rout and trample on not a few genuine professors of the
faith. His whole opposition to the war rested on the limitations
and discomforts inflicted on his own life. It reminded her of
certai