WHEN, punctually at ten minutes to seven, her husband had emerged from the house, Margaret Ransom remained seated in her bedroom, addressing herself anew to the difficult process of self-collection.  As an aid to this endeavour, she bent forward and looked out of the window, following Ransom’s figure as it receded down the elm-shaded street.  He moved almost alone between the prim flowerless grass-plots, the white porches, the protrusion of irrelevant shingled gables, which stamped the empty street as part of an American college town.  She had always been proud of living in Hill Street, where the university people congregated, proud to associate her husband’s retreating back, as he walked daily to his office, with backs literary and pedagogic, backs of which it was whispered, for the edification of duly-impressed visitors:  “Wait till that old boy turns—­that’s so-and-so.”

This had been her world, a world destitute of personal experience, but filled with a rich sense of privilege and distinction, of being not as those millions were who, denied the inestimable advantage of living at Wentworth, pursued elsewhere careers foredoomed to futility by that very fact.

And now—!

She rose and turned to her work-table where she had dropped, on entering, the handful of photographs that Guy Dawnish had left with her.  While he sat so close, pointing out and explaining, she had hardly taken in the details; but now, on the full tones of his low young voice, they came back with redoubled distinctness.  This was Guise Abbey, his uncle’s place in Wiltshire, where, under his grandfather’s rule, Guy’s own boyhood had been spent:  a long gabled Jacobean facade, many-chimneyed, ivy-draped, overhung (she felt sure) by the boughs of a venerable rookery.  And in this other picture—­the walled garden at Guise—­that was his uncle, Lord Askern, a hale gouty-looking figure, planted robustly on the terrace, a gun on his shoulder and a couple of setters at his feet.  And here was the river below the park, with Guy “punting” a girl in a flapping hat—­how Margaret hated the flap that hid the girl’s face!  And here was the tennis-court, with Guy among a jolly cross-legged group of youths in flannels, and pretty girls about the tea-table under the big lime:  in the centre the curate handing bread and butter, and in the middle distance a footman approaching with more cups.

Margaret raised this picture closer to her eyes, puzzling, in the diminished light, over the face of the girl nearest to Guy Dawnish—­bent above him in profile, while he laughingly lifted his head.  No hat hid this profile, which stood out clearly against the foliage behind it.

“And who is that handsome girl?” Margaret had said, detaining the photograph as he pushed it aside, and struck by the fact that, of the whole group, he had left only this member unnamed.

“Oh, only Gwendolen Matcher—­I’ve always known her—.  Look at this:  the almshouses at Guise.  Aren’t they jolly?”