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Now again he was perfectly aware that the whole thing might have been pure fancy, but one day Peter became conscious of a change of atmosphere in the cottage. A repose, a peace, hitherto foreign seemed to have descended upon it. When precisely the change occurred Peter did not know, he [Pg 51]merely suddenly became conscious that the change was there.

Of course it might have been pure fancy, but Peter did not think it was.

CHAPTER VI

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I

General Carden, V.C., C.B., D.S.O., was sitting at breakfast in his house in Sloane Street. He was not a young man—in fact, he had just passed his seventy-seventh birthday—but there was about him an air of trim spruceness, an uprightness that many a younger man might have envied. His height in his stockinged feet was exactly six feet one. He was handsome, too, with his fine aquiline features, his snow-white hair, and his drooping moustache. His blue eyes, under shaggy eyebrows, were perhaps a trifle faded from the colour of their youth, yet they struck a very decided note in contrast to his face, which was like old ivory, and to the pallor of his hair.