over his face, and went quickly out. Mrs. Noel stood for a little while
where he had left her; then, sitting down once more at the piano, began
again to con over the line of music. And the cat stole back to the window
to watch the swallows. The sunlight was dying slowly on the top branches
of the lime-tree; a, drizzling rain began to fall.

CHAPTER XX

Claud Fresnay, Viscount Harbinger was, at the age of thirty-one, perhaps
the least encumbered peer in the United Kingdom. Thanks to an ancestor
who had acquired land, and departed this life one hundred and thirty
years before the town of Nettlefold was built on a small portion of it,
and to a father who had died in his son's infancy, after judiciously
selling the said town, he possessed a very large income independently of
his landed interests. Tall and well-built, with handsome,
strongly-marked features, he gave at first sight an impression of
strength--which faded somewhat when he began to talk. It was not so much
the manner of his speech--with its rapid slang, and its way of turning
everything to a jest--as the feeling it produced, that the brain behind
it took naturally the path of least resistance. He was in fact one of
those personalities who are often enough prominent in politics and social
life, by reason of their appearance, position, assurance, and of a
certain energy, half genuine, and half mere inherent predilection for
short cuts. Certainly he was not idle, had written a book, travelled, was
a Captain of Yeomanry, a Justice of the Peace, a good cricketer, and a
constant and glib speaker. It would have been unfair to call his
enthusiasm for social reform spurious. It was real enough in its way,
and did certainly testify that he was not altogether lacking either in
imagination or good-heartedness. But it was over and overlaid with the
public-school habit--that peculiar, extraordinarily English habit, so
powerful and beguiling that it becomes a second nature stronger than the
first--of relating everything in the Universe to the standards and
prejudices of a single class. Since practically all his intimate
associates were immersed in it, he was naturally not in the least
conscious of this habit; indeed there was nothing he deprecated so much
in politics as the narrow and prejudiced outlook, such as he had observed
in the Nonconformist, or labour politician. He would never have admitted
for a moment that certain doors had been banged-to at his birt