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.