"I, too, have been out with the hounds," the young man continued; "I have
left my horse at the Crow and Sceptre at Dolford. You are living at
Black Dene, are you not? I can take you right past your door, it is all
on my way."
Yeovil hung back for a moment, overwhelmed with vexation and
embarrassment, but it was too late to cancel the arrangement he had
unwittingly entered into, and he was constrained to put himself under
obligation to the young officer with the best grace he could muster.
After all, he reflected, he had met him under his own roof as his wife's
guest. He paid his reckoning to mine host, tipped the stable lad who had
helped him with his horse, and took his place beside von Gabelroth in the
car.
As they glided along the dark roadway and the young German reeled off a
string of comments on the incidents of the day's sport, Yeovil lay back
amid his comfortable wraps and weighed the measure of his humiliation. It
was Cicely's gospel that one should know what one wanted in life and take
good care that one got what one wanted. Could he apply that test of
achievement to his own life? Was this what he really wanted to be doing,
pursuing his uneventful way as a country squire, sharing even his sports
and pastimes with men of the nation that had conquered and enslaved his
Fatherland?
The car slackened its pace somewhat as they went through a small hamlet,
past a schoolhouse, past a rural police-station with the new monogram
over its notice-board, past a church with a little tree-grown graveyard.
There, in a corner, among wild-rose bushes and tall yews, lay some of
Yeovil's own kinsfolk, who had lived in these parts and hunted and found
life pleasant in the days that were not so very long ago. Whenever he
went past that quiet little gathering-place of the dead Yeovil was wont
to raise his hat in mute affectionate salutation to those who were now
only memories in his family; to-night he somehow omitted the salute and
turned his head the other way. It was as though the dead of his race saw
and wondered.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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