‘My impression was that it was Mr Stephens’s bird, my lord,’ said Percy Maidment doggedly.

‘Where was it lying?’

‘Just here, my lord.’

‘That was one of mine. Pick it up would you, Jarvis.’

He nodded dismissively to Percy Maidment, who went quite pale with suppressed rage, but turned at once obediently and went to pick up another bird.

Sir Randolph, disappointed (he would have preferred to see Gilbert rebuke both men equally), caught up with his guest. ‘That man of yours seems rather jealous on your behalf.’

‘He’s a good enough man, Jarvis. Been with me for years. He’s not usually wrong about that sort of thing.’ Gilbert spoke with careless assurance. Sir Randolph did not like to object further. It seemed appropriate to his mood that the first cloud of the day had crept up to cover the sun.

★

Cornelius Cardew had heard the last burst of shooting, and was making his way briskly between the hedgerows in the direction in which he had calculated the morning’s campaign must be going. The last drive before lunch, it seemed to him, must be on the outskirts of the small wood which was the last group of trees in the main part of the Park, before the big wood and the descent to the river. He had already ascertained from enquiry in the village that lunch was likely to take place in the boat-house.

As he strode along he noticed with pleasure the small flurries of finches among the hawthorn berries in the hedge, and the flash of a yellowhammer darting ahead of him; he had time to notice a tiny wren making her way along the inside of the hedge towards a pleasant tangle of bramble, hawthorn and dogrose in which several blue tits were already finding nourishment; a pair of magpies were churring at each other (or at him) in the field just over the hedge, and the rooks in the tall elms by the gates of the park were settling back into the branches from which the shooting had earlier disturbed them. Once he had been master in charge of the Ornithological Society, but that was a long time ago, before he had discovered Socialism, before he had married.

‘Is Miss Tremlett interested in birds, sir?’ the boys had asked him with simulated innocence.

That was Ada, the Headmaster’s daughter, serene and swan-like by the river’s edge.

‘Quite, I think,’ he’d answered, assuming indifference.

‘Only quite, sir? She seemed very interested the other evening, sir, when you were looking for moorhens’ nests.’

‘She has a particular fondness for water birds, Watkins. Have you finished your identification sheet for the woodlark?’

Watkins had been a little beast, he remembered, with a filthy mind and a maddening capacity to jabber in Latin verse; he was certainly a don by now. Cornelius had seldom cared for the clever boys. Given books, they taught themselves; he preferred the boys who needed him. He sometimes wondered whether Ada needed him. Ada had been taught only to play the piano, sew and read Emerson’s Essays; and yet he often had an uncomfortable feeling that she was much cleverer than he was. He had encouraged her to read widely since their marriage, but that had only seemed to mean that she had more to talk about to H. W. Brigginshaw when he came over to play duets. She did not like to talk to Cornelius about ideas. She said they made him too excited and then he would start all that nonsense. Cornelius had thought that married life would include all that nonsense quite frequently but it seemed that Ada preferred to keep it to a minimum. As a devoted husband he respected her wishes and continued with admirable disinterestedness to campaign for freer sex for everyone else, only occasionally leaving a particularly eloquent pamphlet on her writing table in the hope that she might read it. Her preferred cause, however, was Votes for Women.