Nor was the old lady peculiar in this respect, for plain as the countenance of Colonel Harold Quaritch undoubtedly was, people found something very taking about it, when once they became accustomed to its rugged air and stern regulated expression.  What that something was it would be hard to define, but perhaps the nearest approach to the truth would be to describe it as a light of purity which, notwithstanding the popular idea to the contrary, is quite as often to be found upon the faces of men as upon those of women.  Any person of discernment looking on Colonel Quaritch must have felt that he was in the presence of a good man—­not a prig or a milksop, but a man who had attained by virtue of thought and struggle that had left their marks upon him, a man whom it would not be well to tamper with, one to be respected by all, and feared of evildoers.  Men felt this, and he was popular among those who knew him in his service, though not in any hail-fellow-well-met kind of way.  But among women he was not popular.  As a rule they both feared and disliked him.  His presence jarred upon the frivolity of the lighter members of their sex, who dimly realised that his nature was antagonistic, and the more solid ones could not understand him.  Perhaps this was the reason why Colonel Quaritch had never married, had never even had a love affair since he was five-and-twenty.

And yet it was of a woman that he was thinking as he leant over the gate, and looked at the field of yellowing corn, undulating like a golden sea beneath the pressure of the wind.

Colonel Quaritch had twice before been at Honham, once ten, and once four years ago.  Now he was come to abide there for good.  His old aunt, Mrs. Massey, had owned a place in the village—­a very small place—­ called Honham Cottage, or Molehill, and on those two occasions he visited her.  Mrs. Massey was dead and buried.  She had left him the property, and with some reluctance, he had given up his profession, in which he saw no further prospects, and come to live upon it.  This was his first evening in the place, for he had arrived by the last train on the previous night.  All day he had been busy trying to get the house a little straight, and now, thoroughly tired, he was refreshing himself by leaning over a gate.  It is, though a great many people will not believe it, one of the most delightful and certainly one of the cheapest refreshments in the world.

And then it was, as he leant over the gate, that the image of a woman’s face rose before his mind as it had continually risen during the last five years.  Five years had gone since he saw it, and those five years he spent in India and Egypt, that is with the exception of six months which he passed in hospital—­the upshot of an Arab spear thrust in the thigh.