Archdale, glancing at Elizabeth, saw that she looked extremely well.  He was grateful for her courage and her helpfulness, and he understood better than she dreamed of his doing the distress that the present state of affairs caused her.  He liked her in a spirit of comradeship.  She seemed to him sensitive, yet he felt that in an emergency she would prove as strong to act as to endure.  In no case, he told himself, could he ever be in love with her; she was too cold, too intellectual, she had not enough softness or sweetness to charm him even if his fair cousin had never existed.  But when there was need of a woman with pride and resolution enough to deny strenuously the force of a marriage ceremony that had never been intended, nobody could answer the need better than Mistress Royal.  And it really was not necessary for that purpose that she should feel him such an ogre as he believed she did.  However, that was of no consequence.  He brought himself back forcibly from a gloomy study of possibilities.  There was enough for a man to do in this new world if love were denied him.  He began to talk to those next him about the war already going on at the North.

“Young Archdale has caught the infection,” said Pepperell, soon after to his listener.  “He will be in harness before we know it.”  Edmonson smiled musingly.

“The very thing,” he answered, “the very thing, Colonel Pepperell, for a young man to do.  If he go, I have no doubt I shall catch the fever, too, being in the same house with him; Lord Bulchester may also, who knows? there are three soldiers for you.”

“For me, indeed!” echoed the Colonel with a laugh.  “I should not refuse you, though; I should be proud to pass you over to our commander, whoever he may be.”

Lord Bulchester at the moment looked as if his struggles for the coming months were more likely to be personal than political.  Katie had turned to him with the kindest attention; her eyes looked into his with a shy interest in the devotion that she found there.  She was answering some remark of his, more at length, it may be, than she need have done, but with a most graceful amendment of an opinion doubtfully expressed, when Waldo broke in with some question to her, and she finished in haste and turned to him.  Bulchester turned to him also, and in the eyes of the two men as they met was war.  Waldo had come back with the determination that while there was life there should be hope.  He had until this time regarded Bulchester’s marked attentions with the amusement that the nobleman’s unattractive exterior was likely to meet with in a rival.  Added to that was Waldo’s conceit, which made him look through the large end of the telescope in viewing others.  But now he had heard Katie’s dallying—­why hadn’t she finished the fellow up quickly?—­he had read the determination in Bulchester’s face, and had remembered his title.  Katie, meanwhile, with admirable unconsciousness, talked, now with one, now with the other, giving most attention to Waldo, and yet making Bulchester feel that if she had been assigned to him at dinner the greater share would without effort from her have been his.