Leonora took the soiled envelope, and handing over the flowers to Ethel,
crossed the lawn and sat down on the rustic seat, facing the house. The
dog followed her, and with his great paw demanded her attention, but she
abruptly dismissed him. She thought it curiously characteristic of Uncle
Meshach that he should write her a letter on her fortieth birthday; she
could imagine the uncouth mixture of wit, rude candour, and wisdom with
which he would greet her; his was a strange and sinister personality,
but she knew that he admired her. The note was written in Meshach's
scraggy and irregular hand, in three lines starting close to the top of
half a sheet of note paper. It ran: 'Dear Nora, I hear young Twemlow is
come back from America. You had better see as your John looks out for
himself.' There was nothing else, no signature.

As she read it, she experienced precisely the physical discomfort which
those feel who travel for the first time in a descending lift. Fifteen
quiet years had elapsed since the death of her husband's partner
William Twemlow, and a quarter of a century since William's wild son,
Arthur, had run away to America. Yet Uncle Meshach's letter seemed to
invest these far-off things with a mysterious and disconcerting
actuality. The misgivings about her husband which long practice and
continual effort had taught her how to keep at bay, suddenly overleapt
their artificial barriers and swarmed upon her.

The long garden front of the dignified eighteenth-century house, nearly
the last villa in Hillport on the road to Oldcastle, was extended before
her. She had played in that house as a child, and as a woman had
watched, from its windows, the years go by like a procession. That house
was her domain. Hers was the supreme intelligence brooding creatively
over it. Out of walls and floors and ceilings, out of stairs and