“A Field-Marshal, Guy. You forget that the Townshends have the reputation of having lost more of their soldiers’ lives than any other service-family in England.” And so it would go on for ever, Guy contending that as Hilary was nothing in himself it was disloyal of him not to wed and bring forth direct heirs, while Hilary’s attitude would be one of benevolently beckoning to the sombre heights of Cumberland, where sat the house of Curle-Townshend, heirs-apparent to Magralt and all its fiefs. Any one, as Hilary was once goaded into muttering, would have thought that Guy’s own marriage was the happiest in the world; at worst, any one might have thought that it was a happy marriage, as marriages go. Guy, it was said, adored his wife. Guy, it was said, never spoke to his wife except in public and as he passed through her room in the morning towards his bath, when he said “Good-morning.” It was Lady de Travest who volunteered this information. “I do not see,” said Lady de Travest in her slow soft voice, “why one should for ever conceal the fact that one’s husband is cruel to one. It is nothing for one to be ashamed of, is it?” Moira de Travest was a quiet woman, with slow graces of movement, statuesque, exceedingly handsome in what you might call a public way, with a dark, restrained smile in the blue eyes under the hair that shone like black silver. Suddenly she would give a very loud laugh, and then her eyes would shine boyishly for a second. She had many intimate friends among women, and at times she was rather brilliant in a man-like way. Foreign Ambassadors liked to be with her. Mr. de Laszlo, M.V.O., painted her. Women novelists had tea with her. Twice a year she would say that a day must come when she must take a lover, but she gave one a profound sense that there was nothing in the world she could endure less. But, whatever it was that had gone wrong between those two ten years before, they had a son, a boy of sixteen, at Eton, and Guy de Travest would remain by his marriage without question of separation or divorce. That was cruel of him, Moira’s friends said, but Guy was a very catholic gentleman, and he loved his son beyond all things. In the earlier pages of country house albums one might come on photographs of Guy and Moira arm-in-arm, yellow Viking and black silver. They did not seem to have aged at all since then, but maybe Lady de Travest was a little more statuesque and her eyes would shine more and more boyishly.