"I suppose I have," he said. "I don't know that I'd thought about it quite like that. It gets into your blood though, doesn't it? By Jove, you know—the shooting down here is worth living for. Now do you see those bullocks there, in the far pasture? They're Jerseys—I'm breeding them as an experiment. M—Maddock, my agent, says they're the best of anything he's seen of the sort."
"Does he?"
"And you know, we're starting the Witchgate hounds again this autumn? I've been fixing it up with young Seton and Colonel Macallister. Seton'll be Master I think—in place of his brother. Rotten luck young Seton being killed. No son either. Do you know, Muriel, there were times during the war when I used to get the idea that I might never come back to it, and I used to lie awake at night and sweat with fear?"
"I do believe it."
"It gets you, you know. It gets you. There's not an acre that I don't know in Weare or Mardlehammar. Jolly good lot of tenants too. Have you ever met Willis of Ringpool Farm?—that's on the Mardlehammar land. Fine chap Willis, and brainy, too. You'd like him."
Again they were silent, watching the little Jersey cows in the far pasture, golden, like browsing flowers under the warm sunlight.
"You know," he went on, "you were right that evening in London. By Jove, you were. Clare could never have understood this. You've got to have a wife that understands. I was pretty well knocked down then, but I'm glad now."
He paused as though thinking this over.
"I'm glad it happened," he repeated solemnly, "the whole thing I mean. I wouldn't want not to have known her—except for one thing."
"What's that?" asked Muriel.