DEAR JOHN, You are the only one of my relations by blood or marriage with whom neither Joan nor I ever quarrelled. And so, just because you left us alone, I can't leave you alone. I want you to be Martin's guardian, in case this illness should do for me: you have seen something of him and I know you like him. There is no home in the world to which I would sooner entrust my son than yours. I have only a thousand pounds and I want him to be decently educated. You have a family and I should hate to think that I was burdening you. So you must just go for the capital: he has a good scholarship at Elfrey and ought to get one at Oxford. In that case the thousand pounds ought just to see him through. It's plainly no use investing for fifty pounds a year. Don't encourage him to be an artist: he can't afford it. Besides it's a poor life to be a wanderer when you're old, and that's what he would be without money. If he seems inclined for safety and the Civil Service, let him take his chance. Anyhow I trust you absolutely. Yours ever, RICHARD LEIGH. So Martin had spent the last three weeks of his summer holiday at The Steading and thither he had now returned. John Berrisford was a round, ruddy little man who was too English to be like Napoleon and too Napoleonic to be like an English squire. In all matters of theory, especially moral and political, he was fiercely progressive, in all matters of taste a conservative. He combined revolutionary fervour with a strong belief in old customs, old cheese, and old wine. He ran a small estate on which he gave his labourers a twenty-shilling minimum, decent cottages, and free beer on festal occasions, and to the grief of the neighbouring farmers he made it pay. Sport of all kinds attracted him, and on Saturdays in the autumn and winter he would bring down partridges and pheasants with remarkable certainty, but he was sufficiently logical not to cap his battues by going to church on the following day. He made friends with everybody and was criticised by the squires for being a rebel and by the rebels, of whom the village had two, for being a squire. This amused him intensely and his first answer to all criticism was a drink. Then he would start out magnificently to justify his position. "I get the best of everything," he said, and meant it. Martin, of course, missed his father's companionship: they had lived on very intimate terms and the customary limitations of the parental relationship had been broken through. But it is the privilege of youth to forget easily, and it was fortunate for Martin that almost directly after his father's death he should have been plunged into a new world, a world whose thronging cares and pleasures gave few moments for reflection. By the time he had returned to The Steading his personality had so grown and developed that he was freed from painful memories and able to enjoy his holidays.