‘Aline Hartlip is a trouble-maker,’ he now wrote. ‘She has what Minnie would call a mauvaise langue. Gilbert is a capital fellow and a real sportsman. Lionel Stephens is a fine young man whom I admire because he works hard and is making what I understand is beginning to be a brilliant career at the Bar. He tells me he doesn’t care for politics so he is doing what he does in order to lead a useful and interesting life whereas he could have sat on his perfectly pleasant little estate in Lincolnshire and gone on being an amateur sportsman and nothing else. His mother had a bit of money so he wouldn’t have been badly off. Instead he saw what was happening, saw that that sort of life isn’t the life for a man any more – the sort of life I lead. Everything’s against us now. The politicians are determined to turn this country into an urban society instead of a rural one and in the course of the change they think they’ve got to take away the power of the landed proprietor. So they fling Acts of Parliament at our heads, set up town councils, parish councils, abolish residential qualifications for JPs, encourage us to sell our possessions instead of keeping them entailed for the next generation, do nothing to help agriculture out of its terrible problems – and now the Liberals are crippling us with taxes. For generations we ran the country; it did not suffer from our rule. If the landlord class goes, everything goes. It will be the ruin of rural England. Ida tells me I am prejudiced. Show me the man with blood in his veins who is not.’

Sir Randolph was feeling much better already.

‘An age,’ he wrote, ‘even perhaps a civilization, is coming to an end – it is happening all over Europe. In the meantime it is bad for the young men. If you take away the proper functions of an aristocracy, what can it do but play games too seriously? It happened at the end of feudalism and it is happening now.’

‘I think I shall write a short pamphlet,’ he said aloud. ‘For private circulation. Decently printed and so on.’

Tom Harker was in the darkness on his way home along the road when his collie, who was a few paces in front of him, stopped suddenly, then came back to walk very close to his heels. Alerted, Tom felt his pockets to make sure that nothing incriminating in the way of pieces of netting or rabbit’s feet might be seen and then quickened his pace. Round the next corner, also moving at a steady pace, came a tall figure whose face he could not see in the dusk, surmounted by a wide-brimmed hat and wrapped in a thick Norfolk jacket and a long scarf.

‘Good evening, friend.’

Tom was now close enough to see that the speaker also wore a grey beard and stout walking boots.