The Peter Jameson who breakfasted with his wife at a quarter to eight on Armistice Morning was a very different animal from the our Mr. Jameson whose taxi had driven up to 22 a. Lowndes Square, London, four and a half years previously. Grayed hair and lined face still betrayed convalescence, the weariness of war-time; but his eyes, his voice, the whole atmosphere of happiness he exuded, testified a change in the man’s mentality.

His essential creed had not altered: he still believed in work, and in successful work; he still loathed inefficiency, slackness, the never-mind-tomorrow attitude. But love, impersonated in Patricia, had softened the harshness of his youth; taught him the grand lesson of tolerance. Love had nearly bridged that vast, bitter gulf between fighting-man and stay-at-home: almost, he saw England whole—-not a country divided against itself, but a People working hand-in-hand for the common cause. Love, too, had opened Peter Jameson’s eyes so that they saw not only profits but also beauty in the new work to which he had dedicated himself.

This new work prospered slowly, as the land should prosper. Already Capital had begun its revivifying influence. Old man Tebbits’ tumble-down milking-sheds existed no longer: instead, were clean stables of brick and tile, spotless pails and sterilized pans. Useless wooden structures, harbourage of rats, had been pulled down. The ricks stood, stone-based, two feet above ground. Charlie Tebbits had re-built and added to old man Tebbits’ insanitary pig-sties. A tractor-plough phutted in the fields. Also—Peter’s first coup—Tebbits-Jameson Ltd. had bought out the Arlsfield “carrier,” a rickety old man with a rickety old horse; replaced his creaking equipage by a petrol delivery-van; and made themselves masters of the transport-situation. This van, as Peter saw it, was to be the forerunner of a fleet which would carry passengers, market produce, sell and buy eggs and milk, fruit and honey and vegetables across half-a-county. Plans for bacon-factory, cheese-factory, jam-factory—(and tracings of a sugar-beet plant which Peter had not yet dared show Harry Tebbits)—all lay locked away till peace-time in the drawers of Peter’s walnut-wood writing-desk.

Sunflowers, run as a separate establishment, was already unrecognizable. The paddock—silent, original founder of “T.J.’s Ltd.”—existed no longer. Only the pig-path, fenced from sties to wood’s edge, still showed a band of narrowing-green ribbon across the brown of plough. All autumn, the “paddock” had been a mellow-gold riot of Russian sunflowers: two acres of sunflowers whose produce, bushel upon bushel of the finest chicken-feed, filled a dozen zinc bins in the new poultry store-room. Roger Fry had gone to the war; Roger Fry’s hybrids to the stock-pot. In their place, came a marvel of a man from St. Dunstan’s Hospital, the cheeriest soul for all his blinded eyes that ever took good wages of a Saturday, and two hundred black Leghorns who clucked about the orchard from sunrise to sun-downing.

“And it’s only in its infancy,” thought Peter, helping himself to another rasher of Miss Tebbits’ black-treacle curing, “only in its infancy. Scrap the ‘state-control’ idea. Give every man his chance. Let Capital and Labour co-operate as we’re co-operating—and the Lord knows where we won’t get to in a dozen years of peace.”

“We ought to be off in about ten minutes,” he said to his wife. “You know what Dilly and Dally are at this time in the morning.”

“Dilly and Dally,” at Sunflowers, meant the inhabitants of Glen Cottage, who kept a mystic time-table of their own, officially supposed to depend on Francis’ working hours, but actually adjusted—with meticulous accuracy—to weather-conditions. “When it’s fine,” Beatrice once condescended to explain, “Prout thinks we ought to rise with the sun. When it’s wet, he doesn’t think we ought to get up at all.”

“I told them to be ready by half-past eight”—Patricia glanced at the clock on the wall-bracket—“we don’t want to scorch.”