It was doubtful whether he would get to Ascot this year.  And his mind flew for a moment to his promising two-year-old Casetta; then dashed almost violently, as though in shame, to the Admiralty and the doubt whether they were fully alive to possibilities.  He himself occupied a softer spot of Government, one of those almost nominal offices necessary to qualify into the Cabinet certain tried minds, for whom no more strenuous post can for the moment be found.  From the Admiralty again his thoughts leaped to his mother-in-law.  Wonderful old woman!  What a statesman she would have made!  Too reactionary!  Deuce of a straight line she had taken about Mrs. Lees Noel!  And with a connoisseur’s twinge of pleasure he recollected that lady’s face and figure seen that morning as he passed her cottage.  Mysterious or not, the woman was certainly attractive!  Very 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.