About ten o'clock
-- the features of it were stamped on his memory , the gaunt bitterness of them , the brooding misery . How could he have imagined such a thing ? Much perplexed and rather shaken in nerve , he rowed back across the pond -- to hear the band tuning in the flower-filled drawing-room , as he approached the house . About ten o'clock on the night of the ball at Beechmark , a labourer was crossing the park on his way home from his allotment . Thanks to summertime and shortened hours of labour he had been able to get his winter greens in , and to earth up his potatoes , all in two strenuous evenings ; and he was sauntering home dead-tired . But he had doubled his wages since the outbreak of war and his fighting son had come back to him safe , so that on the whole he was inclined to think that the old country was worth living in ! The park he was traversing was mostly open pasture studded with trees , except where at the beginning of the eighteenth century the Lord Buntingford of the day had planted a wood of oak and beech about the small lake which he had made by the diversion of two streamlets that had once found a sluggish course through the grassland .