Miss Ursula Winwood, hatless, but with a cotton sunshade swinging over her shoulder, and with a lean, shiny, mahogany-coloured Sussex spaniel trailing behind, walked in her calm, deliberate way down the long carriage drive of Drane’s Court.  She was stout and florid, and had no scruples as to the avowal of her age, which was forty-three.  She had clear blue eyes which looked steadily upon a complicated world of affairs, and a square, heavy chin which showed her capacity for dealing with it.  Miss Ursula Winwood knew herself to be a notable person, and the knowledge did not make her vain or crotchety or imperious.  She took her notability for granted, as she took her mature good looks and her independent fortune.  For some years she had kept house for her widowed brother, Colonel Winwood, Conservative Member for the Division of the county in which they resided, and helped him efficiently in his political work.  The little township of Morebury—­half a mile from the great gates of Drane’s Court—­felt Miss Winwood’s control in diverse ways.  Another town, a little further off, with five or six millions of inhabitants, was also, through its newspapers, aware of Miss Winwood.  Many leagues, societies, associations, claimed her as President, Vice-President, or Member of Council.  She had sat on Royal Commissions.  Her name under an appeal for charity guaranteed the deserts of the beneficiaries.  What she did not know about housing problems, factory acts, female prisons, hospitals, asylums for the blind, decayed gentlewomen, sweated trades, dogs’ homes and Friendly Societies could not be considered in the light of knowledge.  She sat on platforms with Royal princesses, Archbishops welcomed her as a colleague, and Cabinet Ministers sought her counsel.

For some distance from the porch of the red-brick, creeper-covered Queen-Anne house the gravel drive between the lawns blazed in the afternoon sun.  For this reason, the sunshade.  But after a while came an avenue of beech and plane and oak casting delectable shade on the drive and its double edging of grass, and the far-stretching riot of flowers beneath the trees, foxgloves and canterbury bells and campanulas and delphiniums, all blues and purples and whites, with here and there the pink of dog-roses and gorgeous yellow splashes of celandine.  On entering the stately coolness, Miss Winwood closed her sunshade and looked at her watch, a solid timepiece harboured in her belt.  A knitted brow betrayed mathematical calculation.  It would take her five minutes to reach the lodge gate.  The train bringing her venerable uncle, Archdeacon Winwood, for a week’s visit would not arrive at the station for another three minutes, and the two fat horses would take ten minutes to drag from the station the landau which she had sent to meet him.  She had, therefore, eight minutes to spare.  A rustic bench invited repose.  Graciously she accepted the invitation.