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.