'This won't do.

I must have six hours' sleep.' And she resolutely set herself to repeat one of the nursery poems of her childhood, till, wooed by its silly monotony, sleep came.
It was a bright March day in the Mannering woods, where the Squire, Elizabeth, and Captain Dell were hanging about waiting for Sir Henry Chicksands.

The astonishing warmth and sunshine of the month had brought out a shimmer of spring everywhere, reddened the great heads of the oaks, and set the sycamore buds shining like jewels in the pale blue.

There was an endless chatter and whirr of wood-pigeons in the high tree-tops, and underfoot the anemones and violets were busy pushing their gentle way through the dead leaves of autumn.

The Squire's beechwoods were famous in the neighbourhood, and he was still proud of them; though for many years past they had gone unnoticed to decay, and were in some places badly diseased.
To Elizabeth, in an artistic mood--the mood which took her in town to see exhibitions of Brabazon or Steer--the woods were fairyland.
The high slender oak of the middle wood, the spreading oak that lived on its borders, the tall columnar beech feathering into the sky, its grey stem shining as though by some magic property in the beautiful forest twilight--the gleams and the shadows, the sounds and scents of the woodland world--she could talk or write about these things as poetically, and as sincerely, as any other educated person when put to it; but on this occasion, it has to be said frankly, she was thinking of nothing but aeroplanes and artillery waggons.