"I remember," said John, "when I was a small child a splendid old man of ninety, Richard Hallmark, who used to come to church in a smock frock and blue worsted stockings and a tall black hat. His grown-up grandsons in bowler hats and ill-made coats and trousers looked contemptible beside him, but I believe they were ashamed of him." His dim eyes scanned the familiar lawns and terraces of the gardens that had once been his, and the wide pasture lands beyond. It was all as it had been in his day. Nevertheless he seemed to miss something. "The rooks," he said at last. "I don't hear them. What has become of the rookery in the elms?" "They've gone," she said. "Ten years ago. Michael felt it dreadfully. Even now he can hardly speak of it. I hope, Father, you will never reproach him about it." "Did he shoot them?" asked the old man in a hollow voice. "No, no. He loved them, just as you did, but when he installed the Power Station he put it behind the elm wood to screen it from the house, and he did not remember, no one remembered, the rookery. You see rooks build higher than any other birds, and that was not taken into account in the radiation. At first everything seemed all right. The old birds did not appear to notice it. Even the smallest birds could pass through the current it was so slight. But when the spring came it proved too much for the fledgelings. They died as they were hatched out in the nest. Then the old birds made the most fearful outcry, and left the place." "There has always been a rookery at Marcham," said John, his voice shaking with anger. "I suppose I shall hear of Michael shooting the foxes next." Serena did not answer. She looked blankly at him. * * * * * Presently John asked that his chair might be wheeled up the steep path through the wood to the little clearing at the top. Michael eagerly offered to draw the chair himself, but John refused. He had been distant towards his son since he had heard about the rookery. Serena, with the help of a gardener, conveyed him gently to the heathery knoll, just breaking into purple. John looked out once more with deep emotion at the familiar spot in the golden stillness of the September afternoon. "I sat here with my wife the last afternoon before I went to the front," he said in his reedy old man's voice. "The heather was out as it is now." His eyes turned to the peaceful landscape, the wooded uplands, the river, the clustered villages, and far away the city and the tall chimneys of his factories. As he looked he gave a gasp, and his jaw fell. "The factories aren't working," he said. "Yes, dear, indeed they are." "They're _not_. Not a sign of smoke. It used to hang like a curtain over the city." "Or like a shroud," said Serena looking fixedly at him. "It hung over the grimy overworked mothers, and the poor grimy fledglings of children in the little huddled houses. The factories consume their own smoke now."