Glass felt that God had spoken. He, the father, had told his son to stand in the place where it was written that someone should die, and God had substituted another man so that the son should be spared. It was clear then that God had something particular in mind for the son, and Glass could not persuade himself that that something was that he should be a gamekeeper like his father before him. With a heavy heart therefore he submitted himself to God’s purpose and going to Sir Randolph said, Take him. Since everybody else considered it a great opportunity for the boy and a cause for rejoicing he kept his sorrow and forboding to himself.

Olivia and Lionel corresponded regularly until the second year of the War. They wrote about the books they had been reading and the importance of friendship, and other things of that kind. They also wrote with tender concern about each other’s hopes and fears, and about the pain of separation. Lionel was killed in October 1915 at the battle of Loos. Olivia’s letters were found among his possessions and sent in due course to his mother, who read them with displeasure. For some years she had hoped her son would marry and she resolved now to hate for ever this woman who had evidently stood in the way and so deprived her of the grandchildren who might have consoled her for the loss of her son. Grief wore down her resolution and made her more charitable: eventually she wrote to Olivia, sending her the letters, and later they met.

The letters gave Mrs Stephens no clear indication as to whether or not her son had ever had what she would have called une affaire à outrance with the beautiful Lady Lilburn; all she knew was that the woman who had written so often and so tenderly to her son had cared for him and more than that had known him, for though she saw only one side of the correspondence, it reflected the son she knew and not a stranger. Neither woman was particularly disposed towards intimate confidences, but they had in common their concern to keep his memory alive. Mrs Stephens saw no point in struggling to maintain an estate without an heir; after the War she sold it to a school and took a lease on the dower house of the Lilburn estate. Over the years she and Olivia developed the kind of relationship they might have had had they been mother and daughter-in-law, sometimes critical, occasionally exasperated, generally affectionate.

‘Old Mrs Stephens is a terrific asset,’ Bob Lilburn said. ‘She’s so sharp she makes me yell with laugher.’