n necessary and
leadership when called for, came alike within the scope of her
activities, and not least of her achievements, though perhaps she hardly
realised it, was the force of her example, a lone, indomitable fighter
calling to the half-caring and the half-discouraged, to the laggard and
the slow-moving.

And now she came across the room with "the tired step of a tired king,"
and that look which the French so expressively called l'air defait. The
charm which Heaven bestows on old ladies, reserving its highest gift to
the end, had always seemed in her case to be lost sight of in the dignity
and interest of a great dame who was still in the full prime of her
fighting and ruling powers. Now, in Yeovil's eyes, she had suddenly come
to be very old, stricken with the forlorn languor of one who knows that
death will be weary to wait for. She had spared herself nothing in the
long labour, the ceaseless building, the watch and ward, and in one short
autumn week she had seen the overthrow of all that she had built, the
falling asunder of the world in which she had laboured. Her life's end
was like a harvest home when blight and storm have laid waste the fruit
of long toil and unsparing outlay. Victory had been her goal, the death
or victory of old heroic challenge, for she had always dreamed to die
fighting to the last; death or victory--and the gods had given her
neither, only the bitterness of a defeat that could not be measured in
words, and the weariness of a life that had outlived happiness or hope.
Such was Eleanor, Dowager Lady Greymarten, a shadow amid the young red-
blooded life at Torywood, but a shadow that was too real to die, a shadow
that was stronger than the substance that surrounded it.

Yeovil talked long and hurriedly of his late travels, of the vast
Siberian forests and rivers, the desolate tundras, the lakes and marshes
where the wild swans rear their broods, the flower carpet of the summer
fields and the winter ice-mantle of Russia's northern sea. He talked as
a man talks who avoids the subject that is uppermost in his mind, and in
the mind of his hearer, as one who looks away from a wound or deformity
that is too cruel to be taken notice of.

Tea was served in a long oak-panelled gallery, where generations of
Mustelfords had romped and played as children, and remained yet in
effigy, in a collection of more or less faithful portraits. After tea
Yeovil was taken by his hostess to the aviaries,