"A powerful great creature from what I could see of her," the Colonel admitted. "A bit of a handful for Master Ernie, I should guess."
Mrs. Lewknor's fine face became firm. She thought she scented a challenge in the words and dropped her eyes to her work to hide the flash in them.
"Ernie'll hold her," she said. "He could hold any woman. He's a gentleman like his father before him."
He reached a long arm across to her as he sat and raised her fingers to his lips.
Years ago a bird had flashed across the vision of his wife, coming and going, in and out of the darkness, like the sparrow of the Saxon tale; but this had been no sparrow, rather a bird of Paradise. The Colonel knew that; and he knew that the fowler who had loosed the jewel-like bird was that baggy old gentleman who lived across the golf links in the little house that overlooked the Rectory. He knew and understood: for years ago the same bird had flashed with radiant wings across the chamber of his life too, swiftly coming, swiftly going.
CHAPTER VI
THE COLONEL LEARNS A SECRET
If the Colonel in his missionary efforts for the National Service League made little impression on the masses in the East-end, he was astonishingly successful with such labour as existed in Old Town; which in political consciousness lagged fifty years behind its tumultuous neighbour on the edge of the Levels, and retained far into this century much of the atmosphere of a country village. There the Church was still a power politically, and the workers disorganised. The Brewery in the Moot and the Southdown Transport Company were the sole employers of labour in the bulk; and Mr. Pigott the only stubborn opponent of the programme of the League.
Archdeacon Willcocks backed the Colonel with whole-hearted ferocity, and lent him the services of the Reverend Spink, who, flattered at working with a Colonel D.S.O., showed himself keen and capable, and proposed to run the Old Town branch of the League in conjunction with the Church of England's Men's Society.
"I've got a first-rate secretary as a start," he told the Colonel importantly.