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“We’re mustering this morning. Shearing begins tomorrow,” explained Holmes.

“I’m sorry,” returned Ann, a trifle abashed.

“Not at all, the pleasure’s ours. Don’t run away. Rodney always wakes me and sees that I get breakfast before we start, Don’t go. Have a cup of tea.”

“There you are,” said Marsh, setting a cup on the table in front of her. “Bread and butter?”

Ann did not stop to think that well-conducted governesses do not as a rule sit down in their dressing-gowns at 1.30 A.M. to take tea in the kitchen with the master of the house and the head-shepherd. She sat down.

“I feel as if this were an air-raid tea party,” she said.

“You don’t remember them, do you?”

“Rather. I was ten when the war started.”

“I was nearly smashed up by the bomb that dropped at Swan and Edgar’s corner. I was home on leave from France. I had the wind up all right that night.”

“I remember seeing the barricades there next day,” said Ann.

She and Holmes continued to discuss the war. Rodney Marsh was out of this, but at last Holmes turned to him:

“Marsh has a grievance. He was born too late. Only sixteen when the war ended, poor chap. If he’d only been a few years older he might have been flourishing a wooden leg by now, or still coughing up poison gas, or enjoying a bit of lead in his lung, by way of a treat. It’s a darn shame the way some people have all the fun, isn’t it, Rod?”

“Oh, well! I wish I’d seen it, all the same,” grumbled Marsh.