n again to a warm, drowsy-
scented dining-room, with a productive hinterland of kitchen and cellar
beyond it, and beyond that an important outer world of loose box and
harness-room and stable-yard; further again a dark hushed region where
pheasants roosted and owls flitted and foxes prowled.

Yeovil sat and listened to story after story of the men and women and
horses of the neighbourhood; even the foxes seemed to have a personality,
some of them, and a personal history. It was a little like Hans
Andersen, he decided, and a little like the Reminiscences of an Irish
R.M., and perhaps just a little like some of the more probable adventures
of Baron Munchausen. The newer stories were evidently true to the
smallest detail, the earlier ones had altered somewhat in repetition, as
plants and animals vary under domestication.

And all the time there was one topic that was never touched on. Of half
the families mentioned it was necessary to add the qualifying information
that they "used to live" at such and such a place; the countryside knew
them no longer. Their properties were for sale or had already passed
into the hands of strangers. But neither man cared to allude to the
grinning shadow that sat at the feast and sent an icy chill now and again
through the cheeriest jest and most jovial story. The brisk run with the
hounds that day had stirred and warmed their pulses; it was an evening
for comfortable forgetting. Later that night, in the stillness of his
bedroom, with the dwindling noises of a retiring household dropping off
one by one into ordered silence, a door shutting here, a fire being raked
out there, the thoughts that had been held away came crowding in. The
body was tired, but the brain was not, and Yeovil lay awake with his
thoughts for company. The world grew suddenly wide again, filled with
the significance of things that mattered, held by the actions of men that
mattered. Hunting-box and stable and gun-room dwindled to a mere pin-
point in the universe, there were other larger, more absorbing things on
which the mind dwelt. There was the grey cold sea outside Dover and
Portsmouth and Cork, where the great grey ships of war rocked and swung
with the tides, where the sailors sang, in doggerel English, that bitter-
sounding adaptation, "Germania rules t'e waves," where the flag of a
World-Power floated for the world to see. And in oven-like cities of
India there were men who looked out at the white sun-