y graceful head with its dark hair waved back from the
middle over either temple--very charming figure, no lumber of any sort!
Bouquet about her! Some story or other, no doubt--no affair of his!
Always sorry for that sort of woman!

A regiment of Territorials returning from a march stayed the progress of
his car. He leaned forward watching them with much the same contained,
shrewd, critical look he would have bent on a pack of hounds. All the
mistiness and speculation in his mind was gone now. Good stamp of man,
would give a capital account of themselves! Their faces, flushed by a
day in the open, were masked with passivity, or, with a half-aggressive,
half-jocular self-consciousness; they were clearly not troubled by
abstract doubts, or any visions of the horrors of war.

Someone raised a cheer 'for the Terriers!' Lord Valleys saw round him a
little sea of hats, rising and falling, and heard a sound, rather shrill
and tentative, swell into hoarse, high clamour, and suddenly die out.
"Seem keen enough!" he thought. "Very little does it! Plenty of fighting
spirit in the country." And again a thrill of pleasure shot through
him.

Then, as the last soldier passed, his car slowly forged its way through
the straggling crowd, pressing on behind the regiment--men of all ages,
youths, a few women, young girls, who turned their eyes on him with a
negligent stare as if their lives were too remote to permit them to take
interest in this passing man at ease.

CHAPTER IV

At Monkland, that same hour, in the little whitewashed 'withdrawing-room'
of a thatched, whitewashed cottage, two men sat talking, one on either
side of the hearth; and in a low chair between them a dark-eyed woman
leaned back, watching, the tips of her delicate thin fingers pressed
together, or held out transparent towards the fire. A log, dropping now
and then, turned up its glowing underside; and the firelight and the
lamplight seemed so to have soaked into the white walls that a wan warmth
exuded. Silvery dun moths, fluttering in from the dark garden, kept
vibrating, like spun shillings, over a jade-green bowl of crimson roses;
and there was a scent, as ever in that old thatched cottage, of
woodsmoke, flowers, and sweetbriar.

The man on the left was perhaps forty, rather above middle height,
vigorous, active, straight, with blue eyes and a sanguine face that
glowed on small provocation. His hair was very bright, almost red, and
his fiery