Connie, as he sat there in the dim February sunshine.
`Do you?' she said, seating herself in her blue knitted dress, on a
stump by the path.
`I do! this is the old England, the heart of it; and I intend to keep
it intact.'
`Oh yes!' said Connie. But, as she said it she heard the eleven-o'clock
hooters at Stacks Gate colliery. Clifford was too used to the sound to
notice.
`I want this wood perfect...untouched. I want nobody to trespass in
it,' said Clifford.
There was a certain pathos. The wood still had some of the mystery of
wild, old England; but Sir Geoffrey's cuttings during the war had given it a
blow. How still the trees were, with their crinkly, innumerable twigs
against the sky, and their grey, obstinate trunks rising from the brown
bracken! How safely the birds flitted among them! And once there had been
deer, and archers, and monks padding along on asses. The place remembered,
still remembered.
Clifford sat in the pale sun, with the light on his smooth, rather
blond hair, his reddish full face inscrutable.
`I mind more, not having a son, when I come here, than any other time,'
he said.
`But the wood is older than your family,' said Connie gently.
`Quite!' said Clifford. `But we've preserved it. Except for us it would
go...it would be gone already, like the rest of the forest. One must
preserve some of the old England!'
`Must one?' said Connie. `If it has to be preserved, and preserved
against the new England? It's sad, I know.'
`If some of the old England isn't preserved, there'll be no England at
all,' said Clifford. `And we who have this kind of property, and the feeling
for it, must preserve it.'
There was a sad pause. `Yes, for a little while,' said Connie.
`For a little while! It's all we can do. We can only do our bit. I feel
every man of my family has done his bit here, since we've had the place. One
may go against convention, but one must keep up tradition.' Again there was
a pause.
`What tradition?' asked Connie.
`The tradition of England! of this!'
`Yes,' she said slowly.
`That's why having a son helps; one is only a link in a chain,' he
said.
Connie was not keen on chains, but she said nothing. She was thinking
of the curious impersonality of his desire for a son.
`I'm sorry we can't have a son,' she said.
He looked at her steadily, with his full, pale-blue eyes.
`It would almost be a good thing if you had a child by another man, he
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