Now, it must be observed that it was not Miss Winwood's habit to
waste time. Her appointments were kept to the minute, and her
appointment (self-made on this occasion) was the welcoming of her
uncle, the Archdeacon, on the threshold of Drane's Court. But Miss
Winwood was making holiday and allowed herself certain relaxations.
Her brother's health having broken down, he had paired for the rest
of the session and gone to Contrexeville for a cure. She had
therefore shut up her London house in Portland Place, Colonel
Winwood's home while Parliament sat, and had come to her brother's
house, Drane's Court, her home when her presence was not needed in
London. She was tired; Drane's Court, where she had been born and
had lived all her girlhood's life, was restful; and the seat in the
shade of the great beech was cunningly curved. The shiny,
mahogany-coloured spaniel, prescient of siesta, leaped to her side
and lay down with his chin on her lap and blinked his yellow eyes.

She lay back on the seat, her hand on the dog's head, looking
contentedly at the opposite wilderness of bloom and the glimpses,
through the screen of trees and shrubs, of the sunlit stretches of
park beyond. She loved Drane's Court. Save for the three years of
her brother's short married life, it had been part of herself. A
Winwood, a very younger son of the Family--the Family being that of
which the Earl of Harpenden is Head (these things can only be
written of in capital letters)--had acquired wealth in the dark
political days of Queen Anne, and had bought the land and built the
house, and the property had never passed into alien hands. As for
the name, he had used that of his wife, Viscountess Drane in her own
right,--a notorious beauty of whom, so History recounts, he was
senilely enamoured and on whose naughty account he was eventually run
through the body by a young Mohawk of a paramour. They fought one