And somewhere, in his secret English heart, being a good deal of a soldier, he believed they were right to resent the difference. He felt himself a little in the wrong, for having all the advantages. Nevertheless he represented a system, and he would not be shoved out.

Except by death. Which came on him soon after Connie’s call, suddenly. And he remembered Clifford handsomely in his will.

The heirs at once gave out the order for the demolishing of Shipley. It cost too much to keep up. No one would live there. So it was broken up. The avenue of yews was cut down. The park was denuded of its timber, and divided into lots. It was near enough to Uthwaite. In the strange, bald desert of this still-one-more no-man’s-land, new little streets of semidetacheds were run up, very desirable! The Shipley Hall Estate!

Within a year of Connie’s last call, it had happened. There stood Shipley Hall Estate, an array of redbrick semidetached “villas” in new streets. No one would have dreamed that the stucco hall had stood there twelve months before.