He entered into his new life with enthusiasm. Arrangements were put in train for the dissolution of his marriage. (About this time H. W. Brigginshaw unexpectedly left the Hindhead district and moved to Hampstead; later on Ada married a vegetarian from Cheam.) Cornelius did not really achieve happiness in his new vocation until, it being one of the duties of the Order he had joined to provide a parish priest for the small congregation of Catholics in that part of Somerset where the monastery was situated, he was given this function, and finding himself in circumstances which suited his gregarious nature better than the more solitary life he had been leading within the monastery walls, he became more cheerful and even grew quite fat. He had the good fortune to find as the newly arrived local landowner a millionaire who had made great profit from the manufacture of armaments during the War and was now suffering from a troubled conscience. In no time Cornelius had interested him in any number of schemes. What with arranging interdenominational ecumenical conferences (to the alarm of his superiors and indeed of the authorities of all the Churches involved) and supporting the Peace Pledge, the Anti-Vivisection Society and Major Douglas’s Movement for Social Credit, Cornelius managed not only to relieve his patron of the burden of inordinate wealth, but to provide for himself in his declining years the happiness which comes from total conviction as to the usefulness of one’s work.

Cicely had been right; she never went to Hungary. It seemed to her that she had taken all the fine frivolities, the fur-lined sledges racing over the snow-covered plain, the waltz in the glass-walled ballroom, the wolf-hunt, the pinnacled castles, the sweeping curtsey to the Emperor himself, and heaped them like a great bundle of white flowers onto poor Tom Harker’s grave. She could not prevent herself from thinking sometimes that it had been rather a wonderful thing to have done.

She was a nurse all through the War; so was Grizel Warburton, so were the Walker Kerr girls. There was a time, after Marcus was killed on the Somme, when Cicely felt she would never have a frivolous thought again as long as she lived; but she underestimated her own resilience.

‘The girls in their uniforms have learnt to glide along the passages like nuns,’ Sir Randolph wrote in his Game Book (the house had been turned into a Convalescent Home). ‘But the laughter that often follows their progress through the wards isn’t quite the same – or at least one rather hopes it isn’t quite the same – as that which would follow a cortège of Holy Sisters.’