As far as my novels are concerned, it is simply a question of placing the sort of people whom I know best in the surroundings of which I like to write. Where my characters are in direct contact with the business of the land, or are affected by it, I do not shirk reference to it, as far as it seems to bear upon the main purpose of my story. But I have not set out to present an all-round picture of the conditions of country life in any of the fictional districts I have chosen as the scene of my novels. The great majority of the inhabitants of any countryside are the people who work on the land and live by it, and these I have left out almost entirely; not because I do not recognise their actual importance, but because in the social scene of my stories they would not appear, or only in a very minor degree. It may be an unsatisfactory state of things which divides people off in that way, into social strata, but it undoubtedly exists, and it is not the business of a novelist to justify the conditions he finds, but to reflect them; unless, of course, he sets out to make a discussion of those conditions the basis of his story. As for my family of Graftons, who are real and dear to me, I have pictured them in the sunny days of peace. But in my vision, at least, the shadow of the war lies over them, as it does in retrospect over all immediately pre-war fictional characters. Dick Mansergh and Maurice Bradby would have been fighting since the beginning; Young George and his friend Jimmy would have been caught up in it by this time. In the slaughter of bright youth that is going on, it would hardly be expected that not one out of the four would be killed or wounded. George Grafton would be "doing something," with the men of his generation, and would hardly be able to regard life now as going so easily for him as to make of it a spiritual danger. The girls must have known sorrow and a much changed outlook, unless they have been more fortunate than most. Yes, these are stories of the past, as much as if they had been written about people living forty or fifty years ago instead of four or five. But the shadow will pass away, and life will emerge again into the sunshine. I have looked forward, in writing them, as much as I have looked back. ARCHIBALD MARSHALL. _March_, 1918. CHAPTER I SURLEY RECTORY The old man lay dying at last. He had lingered on for months, now getting a little better and giving hope that the end might be deferred for a time, now sinking, so that it seemed as if it had come; but with all the alterations in his state moving onwards slowly and surely towards his rest. Now there was no longer any hope, even for a few days more. His two daughters and his son sat by his bedside, waiting. There was nothing to do but to wait, and to think.