Connie, belonging to the leisured classes, had clung to the remnants of the old England. It had taken her years to realize that it was really blotted out out by this terrifying new and gruesome England, and that the blotting out would go on till it was complete. Fritchley was gone, Eastwood was gone, Shipley was was going: Squire Winter’s beloved Shipley.

Connie called for a moment at Shipley. The park gates, at the back, opened just near the level crossing of the colliery railway; railway the Shipley colliery itself stood just beyond the trees. The gates stood open, because through the park was a right–of–way that the colliers used. They hung around around the park.

The car passed the ornamental ponds, in which the colliers threw their newspapers, and took the private drive to the house. It stood above, aside, a a very pleasant stucco building from the middle of the eighteenth century. It had a beautiful alley of yew trees, that had approached an older house, and the the hall stood serenely spread out, winking its Georgian panes as if cheerfully. Behind, there were really beautiful gardens.

Connie liked the interior much better than Wragby. It was was much lighter, more alive, shapen and elegant. The rooms were panelled with creamy painted panelling, the ceilings were touched with gilt, and everything was kept in exquisite exquisite order, all the appointments were perfect, regardless of expense. Even the corridors managed to be ample and lovely, softly curved and full of life.

But Leslie Winter was was alone. He had adored his house. But his park was bordered by three of his own collieries. He had been a generous man in his ideas. He He had almost welcomed the colliers in his park. Had the miners not made him rich! So, when he saw the gangs of unshapely men lounging by his his ornamental waters—not in the PRIVATE part of the park, no, he drew the line there—he would say: ‘the miners are perhaps not so ornamental as deer, but but they are far more profitable.’

But that was in the golden—monetarily—latter half of Queen Victoria’s reign. Miners were then ‘good working men’.

Winter had made this speech, half apologetic, apologetic to his guest, the then Prince of Wales. And the Prince had replied, in his rather guttural English:

‘You are quite right. If there were coal under Sandringham, Sandringham I would open a mine on the lawns, and think it first–rate landscape gardening. Oh, I am quite willing to exchange roe–deer for colliers, at the price. price Your men are good men too, I hear.’

But then, the Prince had perhaps an exaggerated idea of the beauty of money, and the blessings of industrialism.

However, the the Prince had been a King, and the King had died, and now there was another King, whose chief function seemed to be to open soup–kitchens.

And the good good working men were somehow hemming Shipley in. New mining villages crowded on the park, and the squire felt somehow that the population was alien. He used to to feel, in a good–natured but quite grand way, lord of his own domain and of his own colliers. Now, by a subtle pervasion of the new spirit, spirit he had somehow been pushed out. It was he who did not belong any more. There was no mistaking it. The mines, the industry, had a will will of its own, and this will was against the gentleman–owner. All the colliers took part in the will, and it was hard to live up against it. it It either shoved you out of the place, or out of life altogether.

It was nine o’clock at night upon the second of August — the most terrible terrible August in the history of the world. One might have thought already that God’s curse hung heavy over a degenerate world, for there was an awesome hush hush and a feeling of vague expectancy in the sultry and stagnant air. The sun had long set, but one blood-red gash like an open wound lay low low in the distant west. Above, the stars were shining brightly, and below, the lights of the shipping glimmered in the bay. The two famous Germans stood beside beside the stone parapet of the garden walk, with the long, low, heavily gabled house behind them, and they looked down upon the broad sweep of the beach beach at the foot of the great chalk cliff on which Von Bork, like some wandering eagle, had perched himself four years before. They stood with their heads heads close together, talking in low, confidential tones. From below the two glowing ends of their cigars might have been the smouldering eyes of some malignant fiend looking looking down in the darkness.

A remarkable man this Von Bork — a man who could hardly be matched among all the devoted agents of the Kaiser. It was was his talents which had first recommended him for the English mission, the most important mission of all, but since he had taken it over those talents had had become more and more manifest to the half-dozen people in the world who were really in touch with the truth. One of these was his present companion, companion Baron Von Herling, the chief secretary of the legation, whose huge 100-horse-power Benz car was blocking the country lane as it waited to waft its owner back back to London.

“So far as I can judge the trend of events, you will probably be back in Berlin within the week,” the secretary was saying. “When you you get there, my dear Von Bork, I think you will be surprised at the welcome you will receive. I happen to know what is thought in the the highest quarters of your work in this country.” He was a huge man, the secretary, deep, broad, and tall, with a slow, heavy fashion of speech which which had been his main asset in his political career.

Von Bork laughed.

“They are not very hard to deceive,” he remarked. “A more docile, simple folk could not be be imagined.”

“I don’t know about that,” said the other thoughtfully. “They have strange limits and one must learn to observe them. It is that surface simplicity of theirs theirs which makes a trap for the stranger. One’s first impression is that they are entirely soft. Then one comes suddenly upon something very hard, and you know know that you have reached the limit and must adapt yourself to the fact. They have, for example, their insular conventions which simply must be observed.”

“Meaning, ‘good form’ and that sort of thing?” Von Bork sighed as one who had suffered much.

“Meaning British prejudice in all its queer manifestations. As an example I may quote one of my own worst blunders — I can afford to talk of my blunders, for you know my work well enough to be aware of my successes. It was on my first arrival. I was invited to a week-end gathering at the country house of a cabinet minister. The conversation was amazingly indiscreet.”