than the daily round of her existence in her aunt's house at
Webblehinton, a hamlet four and a half miles distant from a country town
and about a quarter of a century removed from modern times. Their
neighbours had been elderly and few, not much given to social
intercourse, but helpful or politely sympathetic in times of illness.
Newspapers of the ordinary kind were a rarity; those that Alethia saw
regularly were devoted exclusively either to religion or to poultry, and
the world of politics was to her an unheeded unexplored region. Her
ideas on life in general had been acquired through the medium of popular
respectable novel-writers, and modified or emphasised by such knowledge
as her aunt, the vicar, and her aunt's housekeeper had put at her
disposal. And now, in her twenty-ninth year, her aunt's death had left
her, well provided for as regards income, but somewhat isolated in the
matter of kith and kin and human companionship. She had some cousins who
were on terms of friendly, though infrequent, correspondence with her,
but as they lived permanently in Ceylon, a locality about which she knew
little, beyond the assurance contained in the missionary hymn that the
human element there was vile, they were not of much immediate use to her.
Other cousins she also possessed, more distant as regards relationship,
but not quite so geographically remote, seeing that they lived somewhere
in the Midlands. She could hardly remember ever having met them, but
once or twice in the course of the last three or four years they had
expressed a polite wish that she should pay them a visit; they had
probably not been unduly depressed by the fact that her aunt's failing
health had prevented her from accepting their invitation. The note of
condolence that had arrived on the occasion of her aunt's death had
included a vague hope that Alethia would find time in the near future to
spend a few days with her cousins, and after much deliberation and many
hesitations she had written to propose herself as a guest for a definite
date some week ahead. The family, she reflected with relief, was not a