He looked at the inscription on the flyleaf. Olivia blushed.

‘Lionel Stephens was looking at it today when we were out shooting, and he gave it to me when I said I liked Ruskin.’

‘Good man, Stephens, very good man indeed.’

Olivia had noticed before that as long as the proprieties were observed her husband seldom evinced any signs of jealousy. She was sure that this was admirable and rebuked herself for feeling faintly disconcerted.

All the same she spoke a little wistfully.

‘You care very much for good form, don’t you, Bob?’

‘Certainly,’ he said briskly.

They were all gathered in the drawing room. Harry Stamp and his wife Mildred had come over from Corston, ten miles away, and Philip Ormston who also lived near and was in the Grenadiers with Tommy Farmer was there too, handsome and sporting but more intelligent than Tommy. Ida, who knew nothing of Cicely’s notions about winter palaces and fur-lined sledges, considered him an eligible young man.

The Stamps had lived at Corston as long as the Nettlebys had lived at Nettleby. The inherited genes and the environment having been through the years much the same, it was possible that the Nettlebys had always been irritated by and rather despised the Stamps and the Stamps had always been puzzled by and rather admired the Nettlebys.

‘Well Randolph!’ said Harry Stamp, in a hearty, rallying sort of tone.

Sir Randolph wondered why Harry Stamp always greeted him as if he were a dog. He did not feel like a dog, least of all the friendly sort of trusting retriever Harry Stamp seemed to be addressing.

‘My dear Mildred.’ Sir Randolph turned instead to greet Mrs Stamp, taller and stouter than her stocky, weatherbeaten little husband, daughter of a Leicestershire landowner, Boadicea in the Corston village pageant since time immemorial, béte noire of Minnie. She was wearing a dress of heavy purple brocade with a curiously asymmetrical neckline.

‘How charming you look my dear,’ said Minnie, putting an arm in hers and leading her over to be introduced to the other guests.

‘It is rather nice, isn’t it? It’s this wonderful little woman in the village.’

‘Fascinating,’ breathed Minnie, rolling her eyes at Sir Reuben Hergesheimer as she introduced him. Minnie’s scarcely concealed insincerity in all of her encounters with Mildred Stamp deterred the latter not in the least; she considered Minnie Nettleby one of her oldest friends, and a wonderful woman if a little on the wordly side.

So studded, jewelled, feathered, draped, they went in procession to dinner, and there was not one of them that did not feel some slight, however brief, lifting of the heart as they did so, for even in a ceremonious age to prepare for and then to undertake the opening movements of one more ceremonial the perfection of whose design you did not question, was pleasant. After the opening movements there did for some lurk the spectre of boredom, leading to dread, leading in the end perhaps to that questioning of purposes which had been at the beginning absent; but that was only for some, for Sir Randolph, who had been brought up to a simpler life, for Lionel Stephens, who could not altogether control that capacity to think about anything which Olivia Lilburn so admired in him and who was anyway unsettled by the overwhelming nature of his feeling for Olivia, and for Olivia herself, in whom the whole thing was tentative, the questions half-formed and the answers, though guessed at, unspoken, because she was young, ill-educated and wished to be a good wife. The spectre, though, was altogether absent from Cicely’s view of things.