She was the kindest and best of mothers, but Edgar felt on this particular occasion that she was rather stupid, and a trifle narrow in her ideas. A purely rustic life has its disadvantages, and a life which is one long procession of placid prosperous days, knowing little more variety than the change of the seasons, is apt to blunt the edge of the keenest intellect. Mrs. Turchill ought to have been more interested in Daphne, Edgar thought. ‘She will be delighted with her when she sees her,’ he reasoned, comforting himself. ‘Who can help being charmed with a girl who is so thoroughly charming?’ And then he took up his gun and his rag, and strolled away to another part of the roomy old house, so soberly and thoroughly old-fashioned, not with the gimcrack spurious old fashion of to-day, but with the grave ponderous realities of centuries ago—walls four feet thick, deeply-recessed windows, massive untrimmed joists, low ceilings, narrow passages, oak wainscoting, inconveniences and shortcomings of all kinds, but the subtle charm of the remote past, the romantic feeling of a house that has many histories, pervading everything. Edgar would not have changed Hawksyard and his three thousand a-year for Goring Abbey and a million. The house and the land around it—or at any rate the land—had belonged to his race from time immemorial, far back in the dim days of the Heptarchy. Tradition held that the first of the Turchills had been a sokeman who possessed a yard of land on the old feudal tenure, one of his obligations being that he should breed hawks for the king’s falconers, and thus the place had come in time to be called Hawksyard, long after the last hawk bred there had flown away to join some wild branch of the honey-buzzard family in the tree-tops of primeval Arden, and the yard of land had swelled into a very respectable manor. Edgar rather liked to believe that the founder of his race had been a sokeman, who had held thirty acres of land from the king at a penny an acre, and had furnished labourers for the royal harvest, and had ridden up and down the field with a wand in his hand to see that his men worked properly. This curious young man was as proud of Turchill the sokeman as of Turchill the high sheriff. If it was a humble origin its humility was of such ancient date that it became distinction. Turchill of the thirty acres was like Adam, or Paris, or David. In the long line of the Turchills whose bones were lying in the vaults below Hawksyard Church there had been men distinguished in the field, the Church, and the law; men who had fought on sea and land; men who had won power in the State, and used it well, true alike to king and commons. But the ruck of the Turchills had been country squires like Edgar, and Edgar’s father; men who farmed their own land and lived upon it, and who had no ambitions and few interests or desires beyond their native soil.