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It had always been a mystery to Nicholas Cheynell how a woman like Iris could have married such a taprooted countryman as his cousin Tom. He supposed vaguely that he had got her on the rebound from some other affair. She had a little money and a little beauty—a friend had once described her as "not so much beautiful as with the sort of face which when she's old will make people say what a beautiful girl she must have been"—and the charming, fluttering feminine manner that was fashionable in the last year of King Edward's reign. But she had loved Tom, though she could not love what he loved, and had made him happy, though she had failed to give him what he wanted most. Their only child, born seven years after marriage, was a girl, and Tom had gone out to France knowing that if he died there the Bullens of Doleham Manor died with him.

"If only," he had said to Nicholas as they sat together by the fire on his last leave, "if only we could have the Cheynells here again"—meaning: if only your son could have lived to marry my daughter I need not die more than once. But Nicholas Cheynell, like Tom Bullen, had no heir. He was an older man than his cousin and had married rather late in life the daughter of a struggling peer, whose choice of him must have seemed as mysterious to her friends as Iris's choice of Tom had seemed to hers. Their only son had died before he was six, so when the Bullen daughter was dead the Bullens and the Cheynells would both have gone from the valley of the Doleham River. Only their two houses, one like a red pippin and one like a white stone, would live on among the fields and woods, far into the years beyond them.