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 passages, out of furniture and woven stuffs, out of metal and earthenware, she had made a home.  From the lawn, in the beautiful sadness of the autumn evening, any one might have seen and enjoyed the sight of its high French windows, its glowing sun-blinds, its faintly-tinted and beribboned curtains, its creepers, its glimpses of occasional tables, tall vases, and dressing-mirrors.  But Leonora, as she sat holding the letter in her long white hand, could call up and see the interior of every room to the most minute details.  She, the housemistress, knew her home by heart.  She had thought it into existence; and there was not a cabinet against a wall, not a rug on a floor, not a cushion on a chair, not a knicknack on a mantelpiece, not a plate in a rack, but had come there by the design of her brain.  Without possessing much artistic taste, Leonora had an extraordinary talent for domestic equipment, organisation, and management.  She was so interested in her home, so exacting in her ideals, that she could never reach finality; the place went through a constant succession of improvements; its comfort and its attractiveness were always on the increase.  And the result was so striking that her supremacy in the woman’s craft could not be challenged.  All Hillport, including her husband, bowed to it.  Mrs. Stanway’s principles, schemes, methods, even her trifling dodges, were mentioned with deep respect by the ladies of Hillport, who often expressed their astonishment that, although the wheels of Mrs. Stanway’s household revolved with perfect smoothness, Mrs. Stanway herself appeared never to be doing anything.  That astonishment was Leonora’s pride.  As her brain marshalled with ease the thousand diverse details of the wonderful domestic machine, she could appreciate, better than any other woman in Hillport, without vanity and without humility, the singular excellence of her gifts and of the organism they had perfected.  And now this creation of hers, this complex structure of mellow brick-and-mortar, and fine chattels, and nice and luxurious habit, seemed to Leonora to tremble at the whisper of an enigmatic message from Uncle Meshach.  The foreboding caused by the letter mingled with the menace of approaching age and with the sadness of the early autumn, and confirmed her mood.