All these considerations, well understood and many times discussed with Sir Randolph, weighed on Mr Glass’s shoulders as he walked round from man to man of his beaters to remind them of the plan of campaign. He had the bent shoulders more usually associated with sedentary occupations but in fact often seen on men who walk most of the day. Like most of the keepers and some of the beaters he wore a bowler hat, but his was slightly higher in the crown than most, giving him an old-fashioned look. Though a healthy man he was no longer young.

‘Here a minute, Dan,’ he said, passing his son dawdling along with a couple of other boys of his age. ‘Go over to Walter Weir and tell him to start taking his lot up to the top, will you?’

Dan nodded and walked off with his strong even stride. What was the good of a son, Mr Glass thought, if you couldn’t use him as a messenger boy?

Bob Lilburn was a bigger man than Lionel Stephens. He seemed to Olivia, standing beside him as he waited for the birds to fly out, immobile and solid as an effigy, a great stone Crusader perhaps, raised from some mediaeval tomb, propped up and clothed in giant tweeds. Crusaders too perhaps were sometimes silly men. For all his physical splendour and outward show of large authority she felt she knew him now as simply that, a silly man, who cared for nothing but the social niceties and grew quite sweaty on his forehead at the thought of going down to dinner with the wrong sort of studs in his shirt. She would admit that knowledge to no one, as long as she lived, that was the one resolution she could make, standing there beside him. If there were others to be made, she wanted desperately not to have to make them yet. She was still feeling the shock of Aline’s remark, of the spirit of complicity implied in it. After the heights on which she seemed to have been walking to have had to come down to that, to ‘Congrats, old thing!’

Stretched comfortably on her bed, Minnie was borne along towards sleep by the calm procession of her afternoon thoughts as if she were some frescoed goddess floating on white clouds across a ceiling of cerulean blue. In her room there was no sound except the ticking of the French clock in its glass case on the mantelpiece and the occasional flutter of a tortoiseshell butterfly which, caught in a spider’s web which the housemaids had failed to notice in the top corner of one of the windows, every now and then made a feeble effort to escape, then subsided semi-comatose in the late afternoon sunlight. From outside came the sound of the rooks in the elms, and the occasional soft cooing of a wood-pigeon.