“Is it a Cabinet meeting?”

“Yes.  This confounded business of the balloons.”  But the rather anxious dark eyes of Agatha’s delicate narrow face were taking in the details of a tray for keeping dishes warm on a sideboard, and she was thinking:  “I believe that would be better than the ones I’ve got, after all.  If William would only say whether he really likes these large trays better than single hot-water dishes!” She contrived how-ever to ask in her gentle voice—­for all her words and movements were gentle, even a little timid, till anything appeared to threaten the welfare of her husband or children: 

“Do you think this war scare good for Eustace’s prospects, Father?”

But her father did not answer; he was greeting a new-comer, a tall, fine-looking young man, with dark hair and a fair moustache, between whom and himself there was no relationship, yet a certain negative resemblance.  Claud Fresnay, Viscount Harbinger, was indeed also a little of what is called the ‘Norman’ type—­having a certain firm regularity of feature, and a slight aquilinity of nose high up on the bridge—­but that which in the elder man seemed to indicate only an unconscious acceptance of self as a standard, in the younger man gave an impression at once more assertive and more uneasy, as though he were a little afraid of not chaffing something all the time.

Behind him had come in a tall woman, of full figure and fine presence, with hair still brown—­Lady Valleys herself.  Though her eldest son was thirty, she was, herself, still little more than fifty.  From her voice, manner, and whole personality, one might suspect that she had been an acknowledged beauty; but there was now more than a suspicion of maturity about her almost jovial face, with its full grey-blue eyes; and coarsened complexion.  Good comrade, and essentially ‘woman of the world,’ was written on every line of her, and in every tone of her voice.  She was indeed a figure suggestive of open air and generous living, endowed with abundant energy, and not devoid of humour.  It was she who answered Agatha’s remark.

“Of course, my dear, the very best thing possible.”

Lord Harbinger chimed in: 

“By the way, Brabrook’s going to speak on it.  Did you ever hear him, Lady Agatha?  ’Mr. Speaker, Sir, I rise—­and with me rises the democratic principle——­’”

But Agatha only smiled, for she was thinking: 

“If I let Ann go as far as the gate, she’ll only make it a stepping-stone to something else to-morrow.”  Taking no interest in public affairs, her inherited craving for command had resorted for expression to a meticulous ordering of household matters.  It was indeed a cult with her, a passion—­as though she felt herself a sort of figurehead to national domesticity; the leader of a patriotic movement.

Lord Valleys, having finished what seemed necessary, arose.

“Any message to your mother, Gertrude?”