The questioner was Hugh Roughsedge. The young soldier had walked up to Beechcote immediately after luncheon, finding it impossible to restrain his impatience longer. Diana had not expected him so soon, and had slipped out for her daily half-hour with Betty Dyson, who had had a slight stroke, and was failing fast. So that Mrs. Colwood was at Roughsedge's discretion. But he was not taking all the advantage of it that he might have done. The questions with which his mind was evidently teeming came out but slowly. Little Mrs. Colwood surveyed him from time to time with sympathy and pleasure. Her round child-like eyes under their long lashes told her everything that as a woman she wanted to know. What an improvement in looks and manner--what indefinable gains in significance and self-possession! Danger, command, responsibility, those great tutors of men, had come in upon the solid yet malleable stuff of which the character was made, moulding and polishing, striking away defects, disengaging and accenting qualities. Who could ever have foreseen that Hugh might some day be described as "a man of the world"? Yet if that vague phrase were to be taken in its best sense, as describing a personality both tempered and refined by the play of the world's forces upon it, it might certainly be now used of the man before her. He was handsomer than ever; bronzed by Nigerian sun, all the superfluous flesh marched off him; every muscle in his frame taut and vigorous. And at the same time a new self-confidence--apparently quite unconscious, and the inevitable result of a strong and testing experience--was enabling him to bring his powers to bear and into play, as he had never yet done. She recalled, with some confusion, that she--and Diana?--had tacitly thought of him as good, but stupid. On the contrary, was she, perhaps, in the presence of some one destined to do great things for his country? to lay hold--without intending it, as it were, and by the left hand--oh high distinction? Were women, on the whole, bad judges of young men? She recalled a saying of Dr. Roughsedge, that "mothers never know how clever their sons are." Perhaps the blindness extends to other eyes than mothers?