‘It will be so,’ thought Lionel. ‘It is destiny. She will be mine.’

Percy pressed the gun into his hands. Two high birds fell in quick succession.

‘Should have been our bird,’ muttered Albert Jarvis, thrusting the two cartridges he held ready between his fingers into the breach of the gun his boy had handed to him.

Gilbert held out his hand for the gun without moving his gaze from the oncoming birds and muttered through his teeth, ‘Is he doing it again?’

‘He is, m’lord.’

‘Asking for it, isn’t he?’

He pulled the trigger twice, held out his gun, received the other one. ‘How was that?’

‘That’ll teach him, m’lord.’

The bird he had shot fell close to Olivia’s feet.

‘Fool,’ muttered Lionel. ‘What does he think he’s doing?’

‘Pay no attention, sir, I wouldn’t.’

Percy’s voice as he thrust the gun into Lionel’s hands was so urgent in tone in spite of the reassuring nature of his actual words that it acted as a spur to Lionel. His next two shots brought down birds flying so high and fast that many good sportsmen would have missed one if not both. Dan Glass, pausing a moment in his perambulation up and down the length of the wood, stopped on the corner only a few feet away from Gilbert Hartlip and looked across towards Lionel in time to admire his skill. Gilbert was so close that Dan could see the expression on his face, which was one of concentrated hatred. Shocked, Dan wondered if he looked like that himself when he was shooting, but had hardly time to think about it before he was again lost in admiration of the exhibition of pure skill, this time from Gilbert himself. He turned back to walk once more up the side of the wood and felt the small shot scatter over his head and the dead leaves beneath his feet.

Further up the line of beaters in the wood, Dan’s father was tramping solidly through a thicket of brambles laying about him with a stout stick as he went. ‘Fast and furious,’ he was thinking. ‘Fast and furious it is now.’ He was getting close to the line of guns. As he lifted his foot to crush the last spur of bramble he could look ahead and see beyond the trees the familiar figure of Sir Randolph with his gun raised. It was nearly over. Leaving the bramble thicket behind him he walked out onto the soft grass beneath the trees at the edge of the wood. Birds were still flying out but most of them had already gone. The shooting was beginning to die down. As he stepped out of the trees he did not see the woodcock which flew out low and fast at the end of the wood, or the controlled swing of the whole of Gilbert Hartlip’s body as his gun followed it, but he heard the sound which succeeded the shot, the extraordinarily penetrating sound of a man screaming.