th birthday; she
could imagine the uncouth mixture of wit, rude candour, and wisdom with
which he would greet her; his was a strange and sinister personality,
but she knew that he admired her. The note was written in Meshach's
scraggy and irregular hand, in three lines starting close to the top of
half a sheet of note paper. It ran: 'Dear Nora, I hear young Twemlow is
come back from America. You had better see as your John looks out for
himself.' There was nothing else, no signature.

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 intere