Herbert French smiled as he walked.
"Of course, I hope there'll be a boy," said Roger, stopping suddenly to look at Heston Park, half a mile off, emerging from the trees.

"Daphne would like a boy--so should I, and particularly now that we've got the old house back again." He stood and surveyed it.

French noticed in the growing manliness of his face and bearing the signs of things and forces ancestral, of those ghostly hands stretching from the past that in a long settled society tend to push a man into his right place and keep him there.

The Barnes family was tolerable, though not distinguished.

Roger's father's great temporary success in politics and business had given it a passing splendour, now quenched in the tides of failure and disaster which had finally overwhelmed his career.