The river still ran by them on the left, and beyond it was the climbing sweep of the park, with the belts of wood binding it east and west. Once, coming home in the dawn from a dance on the far side, he had found a little fawn in a dim glade. It was said to be lucky to find a new-born fawn. Over the hill-top the wishing-trees used to stand, but he had never been back there since they were cut down. Things couldn’t alter as long as you didn’t go back. They stayed the same while you kept them so in your mind.... The further wood was slowly growing black, because of the hill between it and the west. At the foot of the wood was the long, clean-coloured house, with its pillars and flat windows and wide, stately steps. Kit saw his own life clearly when he looked at the house, because the lives within and around the house were bound together like a bundle of sticks. Through all his memories the romance of a higher class ran like a silken thread through a homespun cloth. High and low, they had seen together so much that was the same. They had watched death and life changing the country-side, and awakened each morning to the gift of the same day. They had done many things together, too, and where one had done them alone, the one that looked on seemed still to have his share. Glancing back from a great age, it was hard to tell where the lives really drew apart. Rich or poor, they belonged to the same scheme of things, and had their final share in the same earth. He could not have told you how many squires he had known. The old family had died off fast, and in the multitude of their names he could not be certain which had gone churchwards first. He was always put to it when asked to say whether Philip Edmund or Edmund John had died before the succession honours were barely his; whether John Philip or merely John had lived to the striking age of fifty-one. One who had lived to be really old had died when Kit was a lad; a fine, old-fashioned autocrat who knew his place. Folks saluted on all sides when he walked up the street, and the women had had to go in and shut their doors. Perhaps he was at his best in the church over the hill, with its hacked Crusader monument and its floor paved with names. All who served him had to come to church, wearing the livery of their class. Even the keepers from over the sands had to be there, crossing the river-channel when they could. The head keeper wore a scarlet coat, he thought, and the others green, and the men with the hound-dogs, blue. Coachmen and grooms came in livery, too, with buttons that shone like little moving moons. Through the deep, diamond-paned windows you could see the churchyard full of gold laburnum trees, and old houses with their feet among the tombs, and luminous patches of morning sky. Those who had been rich or poor in their lives shared the gold of the laburnum equally in death. Nobody nodded in the sermon under the Squire’s eye, or moved a foot to the aisle until he had left the church.