roke, Charles Edward, Walpole, the Farmer King, Bonaparte, Pitt,
Wellington, Peel, Gladstone--echo and Time might have graven those names
on the stone flags and grey walls. And now one tired old woman walked
there, with names on her lips that she never uttered.

A friendly riot of fox terriers and spaniels greeted the carriage,
leaping and rolling and yelping in an exuberance of sociability, as
though horses and coachman and groom were comrades who had been absent
for long months instead of half an hour. An indiscriminately
affectionate puppy lay flat and whimpering at Yeovil's feet, sending up
little showers of gravel with its wildly thumping tail, while two of the
terriers raced each other madly across lawn and shrubbery, as though to
show the blue roans what speed really was. The laughing-eyed young groom
disentangled the puppy from between Yeovil's legs, and then he was
ushered into the grey silence of the entrance hall, leaving sunlight and
noise and the stir of life behind him.

"Her ladyship will see you in her writing room," he was told, and he
followed a servant along the dark passages to the well-remembered room.

There was something tragic in the sudden contrast between the vigour and
youth and pride of life that Yeovil had seen crystallised in those
dancing, high-stepping horses, scampering dogs, and alert, clean-limbed
young men-servants, and the age-frail woman who came forward to meet him.

Eleanor, Dowager Lady Greymarten, had for more than half a century been
the ruling spirit at Torywood. The affairs of the county had not
sufficed for her untiring activities of mind and body; in the wider field
of national and Imperial service she had worked and schemed and fought
with an energy and a far-sightedness that came probably from the blend of
caution and bold restlessness in her Scottish blood. For many educated
minds the arena of politics and public life is a weariness of dust and
disgust, to others it is a fascinating study, to be watched from the
comfortable seat of a spectator. To her it was a home. In her town
house or down at Torywood, with her writing-pad on her knee and the
telephone at her elbow, or in personal counsel with some trusted
colleague or persuasive argument with a halting adherent or
half-convinced opponent, she had laboured on behalf of the poor and the
ill-equipped, had fought for her idea of the Right, and above all, for
the safety and sanity of her Fatherland. Spadework whe