I wondered how much of Jim Loring’s world would survive into this child’s manhood. The servant who unpacked for me confided that he was marking time till he heard of an opening in the colonies. The house-carpenter, who had married one of the maids, told me that he was setting up in business with her savings from a munition-works. The stud-groom engaged me unexpectedly in a discussion of the Pyramids, which he had visited since last I stayed at Chepstow. At first I thought that in his blood, too, unrest was stirring; but I discovered later that the war had only changed his outlook by convincing him of the literal truth of the Old Testament. “Moses . . . and them Pharaohs,” he murmured to himself, looking dreamily towards the junction of Wye and Severn as though it were the Red Sea waiting to pile up its waters and let the children of Israel through. He at least had no desire to roam. Grandfather, father and son, the family had lived and died in sight of the Castle stables; and he would have repudiated his king before he defaulted in his allegiance to the Lorings. In Gallipoli, I gathered, there were frothy, worthless fellows—the scum of midland factories and the dregs of South Welsh pits—who were ready enough to criticize their betters. Firebrands and hot-heads, they maintained that their betters had muddled them into the war and that, if the politicians and the generals had known their job as well as the hewers and fitters, the flower of an army would not have been sent to its death in this way. Their “betters”, according to these critics, had been found out. I suggested that the French, in spite of their scientific training, and the Americans, for all their democratic upbringing had also made blunders; so, I added, had the Germans; but I was preaching to the converted. This criticism was the yapping of town-bred curs; and, if anything exceeded my friend’s devotion to his feudal head, it was his scorn and hatred for the thieving upstarts of city streets. “Then you don’t think anything will come of all this talk?,” I asked. “Not while their lazy bellies are full, sir,” he answered. How long that would be was one of the problems that Bertrand had sent me to solve. “So long as the price of wheat stops where it is,” one of Violet’s tenant-farmers told me, “I can make a living. Of course, if her ladyship raises my rent . . .” He complained of the wages that had to be paid nowadays to old men and boys for a third of the work that was done before the war. “I can’t reduce them,” he added. “Why, d’you know, sir, what a pair of good boots costs you in Chepstow to-day?” I have forgotten the figure; but, when I had occasion to make a few purchases, the shop-keepers apologized for their charges. The cost of labour and materials had gone up; but you could not reduce them when living was so expensive. “A loaf of bread nowadays . . .” began the bootmaker who was oppressing the tenant-farmer’s labourer, who was keeping up the price of bread.