TWO:When he saw them running along the lane from school, or tramping the fields together��they were always together��or helping with the hops or the hay, his heart would stir with a warm, unwonted sense of fatherhood, not just the proud paternal impulse which had visited him when he held his new-born babies in his arms, but something belonging more to the future than the present, to the days when they should carry on Odiam after his death. For the first time he had sons whom he looked upon not merely as labourers to help him in his work, but as men created in his own image to inherit that work and reap its fruits when he was gone.Richard looked upon the pomp and circumstance around him with all the pleasure and vanity of a boy, turning every moment with some laughing sally addressed to his uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, who rode by his side, or, more frequently, to the young Earl of Arundel, the newly-installed marshal of England. These were followed by Percy, Earl of Northumberland, who had so recently resigned the office of lord marshal, Sir John Burleigh, lord chamberlain, the Earls of Oxford, Kent, Buckingham, &c.

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