They had one daughter, to whom they devoted themselves--preposterously, their friends thought; but for twenty years, they were three happy people together.

Then virulent influenza, complicated with pneumonia, carried off the mother during a spring visit to Rome, and six weeks later Lord Risborough died of the damaged heart which had held out so long.
The daughter, Lady Constance Bledlow, had been herself attacked by the influenza epidemic which had killed her mother, and the double blow of her parents' deaths, coming on a neurasthenic condition, had hit her youth rather hard.

Some old friends in Rome, with the full consent of her guardian, the Oxford Reader, had carried her off, first to Switzerland, and then to the Riviera for the winter, and now in May, about a year after the death of her parents, she was coming for the first time to make acquaintance with the Hooper family, with whom, according to her father's will, she was to make her home till she was twenty-one.

None of them had ever seen her, except on two occasions; once, at a hotel in London; and once, some ten years before this date, when Lord Risborough had been D.C.L-ed at the Encaenia, as a reward for some valuable gifts which he had made to the Bodleian, and he, his wife, and his little girl, after they had duly appeared at the All Souls' luncheon, and the official fete in St.John's Gardens, had found their way to the house in Holywell, and taken tea with the Hoopers.
Nora's mind, as she and her sister sat waiting for the fly in which Mrs.
Hooper had gone to meet her husband's niece at the station, ran persistently on her own childish recollections of this visit.

She sat in the window-sill, with her hand behind her, chattering to her sister.
"I remember thinking when Connie came in here to tea with us--'What a stuck-up thing you are!' And I despised her, because she couldn't climb the mulberry in the garden, and because she hadn't begun Latin.