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 spring dawn in the park—­the traditional spot could be seen from where Ursula Winwood was sitting.

Ursula and her brother were proud of the romantic episode, and would relate it to guests and point out the scene of the duel.  Happy and illusory days of Romance now dead and gone!  It is not conceivable that, generations hence, the head of a family will exhibit with pride the stained newspaper cuttings containing the unsavoury details of the divorce case of his great-great-grandmother.

This aspect of family history seldom presented itself to Ursula Winwood.  It did not do so this mellow and contented afternoon.  Starlings mindful of a second brood chattered in the old walnut trees far away on the lawn; thrushes sang their deep-throated bugle-calls; finches twittered.  A light breeze creeping up the avenue rustled the full foliage languorously.  Ursula Winwood closed her eyes.  A bumble-bee droned between visits to foxglove bells near by.  She loved bumble-bees.  They reminded her of a summer long ago when she sat, not on this seat—­as