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He looked at the soldier's clear-cut head with its well-opened eyes, the tiny crow's-feet at their corners, the conventional moustache; he envied the certainty of the convictions lying under that well-parted hair. "I would rather we were men first and then Englishmen," he muttered; "I think it's all a sort of national illusion, and I can't stand illusions."
The colour in his face had died away; it was calm, wrinkled, dead-looking under the flattened, narrow brim of his black hat; his grey moustache drooped thinly; the crow's-feet hardened round his eyes; his nostrils were distended by the queerest smile. "Gratitude!" he said; "almost a vice, is n't it? Good-night!"
"Why, of course!" said the smiling Kincaid. "Now, that's all, isn't it? I fear we're keeping you." "Oh, no." The gray man's crow's-feet deepened playfully. "If you think you need us we'll stick by you all night." "No," laughed Kincaid, "there's no call for you to be so sticky as all that." The horsemen mounted.
"He said you didn't take care of yourself." Swithin glared. "Has anybody else been to see me?" The valet turned away his eyes. "Mrs. Thomas Forsyte came last Monday fortnight." "How long have I been ill?" "Five weeks on Saturday." "Do you think I'm very bad?" Adolf's face was covered suddenly with crow's-feet. "You have no business to ask me question like that!
But when past forty, and his hair was turning to silver, and crow's-feet were showing themselves in his fine face, and when there was a halt in his step and his laughter had died away into a weary smile, he met a woman whose nature was as finely sensitive and as silkenly strong as his own. She had intellect, aspiration, power.
He looked very haggard and worn in that light, very unlike the first citizen who had entered Brampton in triumph on his return from the West not many months before. The long strain of a long fight, in which he had risked much for which he had labored a life to gain, had told on him, and there were crow's-feet at the corners of, his eyes, and dark circles under them.
Pompey and Phillis were bondservants under the mild existing paternal form of slavery. The king's commissioner of imposts perhaps would not have admitted he was passing the prime of life, but the crow's-feet were gathering in the corners of his eyes. His gray tie wig was in keeping with the white hairs upon his brow.
Superiority to passion, abnegation of sorrow, indulgence of amusement, avoidance of excess, had kept away the crow's-feet, preserved the elasticity of his frame and the unflushed clearness of his gentlemanlike complexion. The door opened, and a well-dressed valet, who had lived long enough with Mivers to grow very much like him, announced Mr. Chillingly Gordon.
"Yes," he said, "it 's awfully hard to put up with, but what can a fellow do? One must have farmers. Why, if it was n't for the farmers, there 'd be still a hare or two about the place!" Shelton laughed spasmodically; again he glanced askance at his future father-in-law. What did the waggling of his head mean, the deepening of his crow's-feet, the odd contraction of the mouth?
Young faces grow softly mellow without those lines and anxious crow's-feet that mar the features of the middle-aged, who, to earn their daily bread or to kill the tedium of their lives, find it necessary to dwell in streets. "Loo's home again," men told each other at "The Black Sailor"; and the women, who discussed the matter in the village street, had little to add to this bare piece of news.
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