"Why, of course he will." But as he said it Norman had some doubts of his own. Uncle Edmund was a difficult person. The disordered ground in front of them seemed to cry that aloud. His father was about fed up with it. If Uncle Edmund didn't respond graciously to this last attempt to satisfy his demands there might be no reconciliation at all. There was nothing more left to be done, and he would just have to be left alone till he came round of himself. If Norman read his mother aright, she was already preparing for that to be a long process.
Moreover, he had asked if Pam couldn't be included in the first party, which his father had already made up. The guns were to be three of his father's friends, and Norman and Blundell and Pollock, who were proposing to pursue their course of reading in whatever intervals of leisure might be left to them at Eylsham. Only one man was bringing his wife. There would be plenty of room for Pam. But his mother had said that his father didn't want anybody from the Hall until they knew where they stood. There would be plenty of time later.
So there was something that couldn't be said to her, and yet she must know that in ordinary times she would have been asked. Oh, it was all becoming difficult and beastly again. Why on earth couldn't Uncle Edmund do the proper generous thing for once and put an end to it all for good? Yesterday they had been as happy as larks because they had thought their elders had settled their quarrel. Perhaps they had, but it wasn't certain yet, and in the meantime here was poor little Pam getting sad about it again. And no wonder, with this beastly half-made and unmade garden in front of her eyes.
"Oh, why did we come down here?" he said, turning away in impatience. "I hate the very sight of the place. Let's go back and find the others."
They went back, and were cousinly to one another, but careful again now not to touch upon the awkward subject. The cord that had bound them together so closely the evening before was loosened.
The next day the Grange was left empty, and the gardeners went down to Barton's Close with a horse-roller, and flattened down the places where the ground had been disturbed.