Lionel Stephens was about halfway along the line, Gilbert Hartlip at the end. Looking along the line, Percy Maidment, Lionel’s chief loader, could see Albert Jarvis waiting behind Lord Hartlip.

Percy Maidment was a Lincolnshire man, of agricultural labouring stock. The land he knew best was flat and seemingly interminable, broken only by low hedges and solitary elms and long barrow-like heaps of stored sugar-beet; he hated the land. This implacable loathing was probably the strongest and certainly the most constant emotion of his life. He had volunteered for the army at the time of the South African war but had been rejected as unfit – he was undersized and under-nourished. He had worked on Lionel’s Lincolnshire estate ever since that rejection, and found partial escape from his bondage to the land in two directions – as a driver of Lionel’s mother’s Wolseley car and as a loader for Lionel when he went shooting. Lionel’s mother was responsible for most of the estate management in Lionel’s absence in London. She was known locally as a terror, just as the agent Mr Hopkins was known as a hard man: curiously perhaps, in neither case was the reputation generally felt to be a bad one. As a loader Percy Maidment had quickly become adept. Not only was he neat and quick in his movements but he was fiercely competitive. Lionel was unaware of the strength of this feeling. He smiled on the rare occasions when the usually taciturn Percy revealed anything of it, and put it down to a rather charming loyalty, but it was something more than that. Secretly Percy was maddened by Lionel’s lack of competitive spirit; the notions of gentlemanly sport were inimical to him. The object of shooting parties, he considered, should be to shoot more game than anyone else. He wanted his man to beat Lord Hartlip. He had bet Albert Jarvis ten shillings that he would.

As they waited in silence for the birds to break, a silence soon broken by the sound of the beaters crackling, tapping and whistling their way towards them through the wood, only Charles Farquhar and Tibor Rakassyi were without feelings of tension – or almost without them. Charles was a man who for the time being was getting everything he wanted out of life – that was to say a sufficiency of hunting, shooting, food, drink and women. His affair with Aline had given the finishing touch to his never exactly faltering confidence. The difficult temperament which had driven former lovers to despair bothered him not at all. He put it down to women’s moodiness and ignored it. She was beautiful, fashionable and physically in love with him; through her he was getting asked about more than ever before. To be positively liked by an old oddity like Sir Randolph as well as all that was more than he hoped for. He preferred Minnie anyway; she was, as she would have put it herself, more sortable.

Tibor Rakassyi’s self-satisfaction was less personal. He was pleased with himself for being not so much what he was as where he was. The English nation seemed to him the most prosperous and secure in the world, and the English upper class the most enviable. To move at ease in that society, and to be accepted by it, seemed to him one of the chief joys of the cosmopolitanism to which his membership of the European aristocracy gave him access. He would have been surprised to learn that Sir Randolph, unlike Minnie who aspired to it, considered cosmopolitanism a vice. It was all right to know your way around Paris, Sir Randolph thought, and to visit Italian picture galleries or the relics of the classical world, but generally speaking a man should stick to one country and be proud of it. If one wanted to travel there was always the Empire.