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’er change ’osses after a ten-mile point, get on to a fresh young five-year-old what hadn’t been out for a week – up like a bird – never know you had ‘er foot in your hand, pick up the reins in a jiffy, catch up its head, and off over a post and rails and bucking over the ridge and furrow, sitting like a rock. Now his lordship (he meant Uncle Matthew) he can ride, I don’t say the contrary, but look how he sends his ’osses home, so darned tired they can’t drink their gruel. He can ride all right, but he doesn’t study his ’oss. I never knew your mother bring them home like this, she’d know when they’d had enough, and then heads for home and no looking back. Mind you, his lordship’s a great big man, I don’t say the contrary, rides every bit of sixteen stone, but he has great big ’osses and half kills them, and then who has to stop up with them all night? Mel’
    The rain was pouring down by now. An icy trickle was feeling its way past my left shoulder, and my right boot was slowly filling with water, the pain in my back was like a knife. I felt that I couldn’t bear another moment of this misery, and yet I knew I must bear another five miles, another forty minutes. Josh gave me scornful looks as my back bent more and more double; I could see that he was wondering how it was that I could be my mother’s child.
    ‘Miss Linda,’ he said, ‘takes after her ladyship something wonderful’
    At last, at last, we were off the Merlinford road, coming down the valley into Alconleigh village, turning up the hill to Alconleigh house, through the lodge gates, up the drive, and into the stable yard. I got stiffly down, gave the pony to one of Josh’s stable boys, and stumped away, walking like an old man. I was nearly at the front door before I remembered, with a sudden leap of my heart, that Aunt Emily would have arrived by now, with HIM . It was quite a minute before I could summon up enough courage to open the front door.
    Sure enough, standing with their backs to the hall fire, were Aunt Sadie, Aunt Emily, and a small, fair, and apparently young man. My immediate impression was that he did not seem at all like a husband. He looked kind and gentle.
    ‘Here is Fanny,’ said my aunts in chorus.
    ‘Darling,’ said Aunt Sadie, ‘can I introduce Captain Warbeck?’
    I shook hands in the abrupt graceless way of little girls of fourteen, and thought that he did not seem at all like a captain either.
    ‘Oh, darling, how wet you are. I suppose the others won’t be back for ages – where have you come from?’
    ‘I left them drawing the spinney by the Old Rose.’
    Then I remembered, being after all a female in the presence of a male, how dreadful I always looked when I got home from hunting, splashed from head to foot, my bowler all askew, my hair a bird’s nest, my stocking a flapping flag, and, muttering something, I made for the back stairs, towards my bath and my rest. After hunting we were kept in bed for at least two hours. Soon Linda returned, even wetter than I had been, and gotinto bed with me. She, too, had seen the Captain, and agreed that he looked neither like a marrying nor like a military man.
    ‘Can’t see him killing Germans with an entrenching tool,’ she said, scornfully.
    Much as we feared, much as we disapproved of passionately as we sometimes hated Uncle Matthew, he still remained for us a sort of criterion of English manhood; there seemed something not quite right about any man who greatly differed from him.
    ‘I bet Uncle Matthew gives him rat week,’ I said, apprehensive for Aunt Emily’s sake.
    ‘Poor Aunt Emily, perhaps he’ll make her keep him in the stables,’ said Linda with a gust of giggles.
    ‘Still, he looks rather nice to know, and, considering her age, I should think she’s lucky to get anybody.’
    ‘I can’t wait to see him with Fa.’
    However, our expectations of blood and thunder were disappointed, for it was evident at once that Uncle Matthew had