As they approached the lodge gates he said doggedly, ‘But it is true that we love each other?’

‘Yes, it is true that we love each other.’

‘Then I shan’t say another word.’

He took her arm in his and they walked the whole length of the drive in silence, between the elms which from time to time let fall a yellowed leaf from their almost bare branches, and past the clumps of beeches and the view towards the lake, and between the fences of post and rail and through the gate beside the cattle grid, and past the black-horned sheep grazing concentratedly on the short smooth turf in front of the ha-ha which divided the Park from the garden.

Glass was talking to Walter Weir, holding out to him his own hard hat (his balding head clean and exposed – it was seldom uncovered) and telling him to take it to the river with any others he could find that would serve the purpose and fill them with water. Cicely noticed two men carrying guns and cartridge bags hovering undecidedly behind him as if they wondered whether they too should fetch water. Percy Maidment and Albert Jarvis had not spoken to each other since the accident and neither was anxious to meet the other’s eye.

‘You’d best go on home if you don’t mind,’ Glass said to them. ‘Sir Randolph wants everyone to go on home.’

They nodded and set off across the field, but being both puzzled as to what to think about the outcome of a contest into which they had thrown themselves with such passion, they felt no wish to enter into conversation. Percy gradually fell behind. Albert strode on ahead, the more solid of the two. Percy, an undersized wisp of a man, followed in dejection; the day was ruined, as far as he was concerned. His man had won, had beaten the champion; but who was going to remember that now?

‘I know it’s not really important,’ Cicely said to Glass. ‘But I promised Osbert I would ask you to make sure someone looked after Tom’s dog.’

Glass looked at her blankly for a moment; he had still not recovered from his shock. Having changed Dan’s position and told him to act as stop, and then to have heard that the stop had been shot, and then to have discovered that by some extraordinary miracle Tom Harker had decided on his own initiative (and in fact quite rightly) that there ought to be two stops, and had thereby put himself as it were in Dan’s place and received the wound which might have been thought to have been intended by Providence for Dan – all this had shaken him deeply. Nevertheless when he did understand what Cicely was saying, he smiled at her.

‘I’ll see to it myself. Tell Master Osbert not to worry, I’ll go down there just as soon as we’ve got Tom seen to. I’ll get her up to my place, in the kennels with the other dogs, she’ll be all right there.’