The speech was characteristic, and the others smiled. It would have astonished them had Mrs. Chisholm sympathized with the rebel idealist whose beckoning visions led to the clash of arms.
"Aren't you getting off the track," Vane asked Carroll. "I don't see the drift of your previous remarks."
"Well," drawled Carroll, "there must be, I think, a certain distinctive stamp upon those who belong to the leader type—I mean the people who are capable of doing striking and heroic things. Apart from this, I've been studying you English—I've been over here before—and it has struck me that there's occasionally something imperious, or rather imperial, in the faces of your women in the most northern counties. I can't define the thing, but it's there—in the line of nose, in the mouth, and, I think, most marked in the brows. It's not Saxon, nor Norse, nor Danish; I'd sooner call it Roman."
Vane was slightly astonished. He had seen that look in Evelyn's face, and now, for the first time, he recognized it in his sister's.
"Perhaps you have hit it," he said with a laugh. "You can reach the Wall from here in a day's ride."
"The Wall?"
"The Roman Wall; Hadrian's Wall. I believe one authority states that they had a garrison of one hundred thousand men to keep it."
Chisholm joined the group. He was a tall, rather florid-faced man, with a formal manner, and was dressed immaculately in creaseless clothes.
"The point Wallace raises is interesting," he remarked. "While I don't know how long it takes for a strain to die out, there must have been a large civil population living near the Wall, and we know that the characteristics of the Teutonic peoples who followed the Romans still remain. On the other hand, some of the followers were vexillaries, from the bounds of the Empire; Gauls, for example, or Iberians."
When, later on, the group broke up, Evelyn was left alone for a few minutes with Mabel.