‘But they’re not, darling,’ Rose cried out, ‘they’re nothing like equal. In terms of human happiness, they’re all cock-eyed. Mark says his grandmother’s so desperately worried that with all this coming on top of Sir Harold’s death and everything she may crack up altogether.’

The Colonel’s study commanded a view of his own spinney and of that part of the valley that the spinney did not mask; Bottom Bridge and a small area below it on the right bank of the Chyne. Rose went to the window and looked down. ‘She’s down there somewhere,’ she said, ‘sketching in Bottom Meadow on the far side. She only sketches when she’s fussed.’

‘She’s sent me a chit. She wants me to go down and talk to her at eight o’clock when I suppose she’ll have done a sketch and hopes to feel less fussed. Damned inconvenient hour, but there you are. I’ll cut dinner, darling, and try the evening rise. Ask them to leave supper for me, will you, and apologize to Kitty?’

‘OK,’ Rose said with forced airiness. ‘And, of course,’ she added, ‘there’s the further difficulty of Mark’s papa.’

‘George.’

‘Yes, indeed, George. Well, we know he’s not exactly as bright as sixpence, don’t we? But, all the same, he is Mark’s papa and he’s cutting up most awfully rough and …’

Rose caught back her breath, her lips trembled and her eyes filled with tears. She launched herself into her father’s arms and burst into a flood of tears. ‘What’s the use,’ poor Rose sobbed, ‘of being a brave little woman? I’m not in the least brave. When Mark asked me to marry him I said I wouldn’t because of you and there I was: so miserable that when he asked me again I said I would. And now, when we’re so desperately in love, this happens. We have to do them this really frightful injury. Mark says: of course they must take it and it won’t make any difference to us, but of course it will. And how can I bear to be married to Mark and know how his people feel about you when next to Mark, my darling, darling Daddy, I love you best in the world? And his father’ – Rose wept – ‘his father says that if Mark marries me he’ll never forgive him and that they’ll do a sort of Montague and Capulet thing at us and, darling, it wouldn’t be much fun for Mark and me, would it, to be star-crossed lovers?’

‘My poor baby,’ murmured the agitated and sentimental Colonel; ‘my poor baby!’ And he administered a number of unintentionally hard thumps between his daughter’s shoulder blades.

‘It’s so many people’s happiness,’ Rose sobbed. ‘It’s all of us.’

Her father dabbed at her eyes with his own handkerchief, kissed her and put her aside. In his turn he went over to the window and looked down at Bottom Bridge, and up at the roofs of Nunspardon. There were no figures in view on the golf course.