s not the faintest sound from her, and he
looked back. She was following him with her eyes. He threw his hand up
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