The slight noise was due to the door of the study, which great age had distorted and bereft of sense, and, in fact, almost unhinged.  It unlatched itself, paused, and then calmly but firmly swung wide open.  When it could swing no farther it shook, vibrating into repose.

Audrey condemned the door for a senile lunatic, and herself for a poltroon.  She became defiant of peril, until the sound of a step on the stair beyond the door threw her back into alarm.  But when the figure of Miss Ingate appeared in the doorway she was definitely reassured, to the point of disdain.  All her facial expression said:  “It’s only Miss Ingate.”

And yet Miss Ingate was not a negligible woman.  Her untidy hair was greying; she was stout, she was fifty, she was plain, she had not elegance; her accent and turns of speech were noticeably those of Essex.  But she had a magnificent pale forehead; the eyes beneath it sparkled with energy, inquisitiveness, and sagacity; and the mouth beneath the eyes showed by its sardonic dropping corners that she had come to a settled, cheerful conclusion about human nature, and that the conclusion was not flattering.  Miss Ingate was a Guardian of the Poor, and the Local Representative of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Families Association.  She had studied intimately the needy and the rich and the middling.  She was charitable without illusions; and, while adhering to every social convention, she did so with a toleration pleasantly contemptuous; in her heart she had no mercy for snobs of any kind, though, unfortunately, she was at times absurdly intimidated by them—­at other times she was not.

To the west, within a radius of twelve miles, she knew everybody and everybody knew her; to the east her fame was bounded only by the regardless sea.  She and her ancestors had lived in the village of Moze as long as even Mr. Mathew Moze and his ancestors.  In the village, and to the village, she was Miss Ingate, a natural phenomenon, like the lie of the land and the river Moze.  Her opinions offended nobody, not Mr. Moze himself—­she was Miss Ingate.  She was laughed at, beloved and respected.  Her sagacity had one flaw, and the flaw sprang from her sincere conviction that human nature in that corner of Essex, which she understood so profoundly, and where she was so perfectly at home, was different from, and more fondly foolish than, human nature in any other part of the world.  She could not believe that distant populations could be at once so pathetically and so naughtily human as the population in and around Moze.

If Audrey disdained Miss Ingate, it was only because Miss Ingate was neither young nor fair nor the proprietress of some man, and because people made out that she was peculiar.  In some respects Audrey looked upon Miss Ingate as a life-belt, as the speck of light at the end of a tunnel, as the enigmatic smile which glimmers always in the frown of destiny.

“Well?” cried Miss Ingate in her rather shrill voice, grinning sardonically, with the corners of her lips still lower than usual in anticipatory sarcasm.  It was as if she had said:  “You cannot surprise me by any narrative of imbecility or turpitude or bathos.  All the same, I am dying to hear the latest eccentricity of this village.”