He lifted his eyebrows, and she was annoyed with him for taking her remark as mere bluff. 'You'll see,' she insisted. 'I shall do something desperate.' 'I wouldn't,' he said, quietly. 'Make friends with Miss Bremerton and help her.' 'I don't like her enough,' she said, drawing quick breath. He saw now she was in a mood to quarrel with him outright. But he didn't mean to let her. With those eyes--in such a fire--she was really splendid. How she had come on! 'I'm sorry,' he said mildly. 'Because, you know--if you don't mind my saying so--it'll really take the two of you to keep your father out of gaol. The Government's absolutely determined about this thing--they can't afford to be anything else. _We're_ being hammered, and gassed, and blown to pieces over there'--he pointed eastward. 'It's the least the people over here can do--to play up--isn't it?' Then he laughed. 'But I mustn't be setting you against your father. I didn't mean to.' Pamela shrugged her shoulders, in silence. She really longed to ask him about his wound, his staff work, a thousand things; but they didn't seem, somehow, to be intimate enough, to be hitting it off enough. This meeting, which had been to her a point of romance in the distance, was turning out to be just nothing--only disappointment. She was glad to see how quickly the other pair were coming towards them, and at the same time bitterly vexed that her _tête-à-tête_ with Arthur was at an end. CHAPTER VI Meanwhile Elizabeth Bremerton was sitting pensive on a hill-side about mid-way between Mannering and Chetworth. She had a bunch of autumn berries in her hands. Her tweed skirt and country boots showed traces of mud much deeper than anything on the high road; her dress was covered with bits of bramble, dead leaves, and thistledown; and her bright gold hair had been pulled here and there out of its neat coils, as though she had been pushing through hedges or groping through woods. 'It's perfectly _monstrous_!' she was thinking. 'It oughtn't to be allowed. And when we're properly civilized, it won't be allowed. No one ought to be free to ruin his land as he pleases! It concerns the _State_. "Manage your land decently--produce a proper amount of food--or out you go!" And I wouldn't have waited for war to say it! Ugh! that place!'