“How are you getting on with that book you’ve got to read, darling?”

The book was Pollard’s Factors in Modern History. Eric had got it and several others to read during these holidays. Lily had looked into it a day or two before and had asked Eric to read some aloud to her. It helped his stammering. She couldn’t follow very much of it—the author seemed always to be alluding to things she hadn’t heard of. She began to realise that History meant different things to different people. She’d always thought she knew a good deal herself. There was a time when she could have told you how all the English kings were related and who they married and the names of most of their children. But Lily took a great pleasure in hearing Eric read the Factors, for it was all History, and how clever Eric must be to understand it.

When she addressed him now, he looked up, so grave and preoccupied, with his ugly hands folded on one knee. It was easy to imagine him meditating in a study. He had been startled out of his thoughts.

“Oh, all r-right.”

His answer was rather curt, very different from the way in which he usually spoke to her, but Lily did not notice it. Already she was back again in the past. She had almost forgotten him. They were passing the mill, with its rows of blank windows, high above them. And now they were at the canal and looking down into the lock, the water so black and deep down, and the tall weedy gates letting through no more than a trickle. Lily had come up here to sketch while she was engaged. It made a beautiful water-colour. The bar of the gates, black and white, standing out against the distant hills, and the barge coming down with scarlet hatches, and the slope of the ground spreading away from you—the woods just below and the church tower showing. That picture had been one of Richard’s favourites. They had had it up in the dining-room of their little house in Earl’s Court all the time they were married.

“I should think we’d better sit at the back, today,” said Lily to Mr. Vernon. “It won’t be so far for you to walk; and there’s sure to be a crowd.”

Mr. Vernon smiled, grunted, nodded.

But immediately it occurred to Lily: I should hate people not to see him. The Squire. Lily felt a tremendous loyalty to John as the Squire. He represented the Hall. There was a great deal of Socialism in the village, she had heard, since the War. Chapel Bridge had always had a tendency to Socialism. Lily had come to think of certain people as loyal to Papa and others as not loyal. Mr. Askew, who kept the paper-shop, was loyal. Mr. Hardwick, the bank manager, was loyal. Mr. Higham, the grocer, though polite to Papa’s money, was not loyal. Lily remembered how good Mamma had always been to the people of Chapel Bridge, and it made her furious to think that these people or their children could repudiate the leadership of the Hall in the village life. But the fact was, the village was no longer a village, but a suburb. Rich men lived there, who went into business every day in quick trains to Manchester. Most of them had made money in the War. Lily could hate these people passionately.