orkers, in the task of helping
England win the war, and several of them wore the khaki or blue of
active service abroad. They were all very much at ease, laughing and
talking as they drank their tea and threw cake to the peacocks perched
on the high terrace walk above their heads.

The ladies were the guests of Sir Philip Heredith. Some months before,
his only son Philip, then holding a post in the War Office, had fallen
in love with the pretty face of a girl employed in one of the
departments of Whitehall. He married her soon afterwards, and brought
her home to the moat-house. It was the young husband who had suggested
that they should liven up the old moat-house by inviting some of their
former London friends down to stay with them. Violet Heredith, who found
herself bored with country life after the excitement of London war work,
caught eagerly at the idea, and the majority of the ladies at tea were
the former Whitehall acquaintances of the young wife, with whom she had
shared matinee tickets and afternoon teas in London during the last
winter of the war.

The hostess of the party, Miss Alethea Heredith, sister of the present
baronet, Sir Philip Heredith, and mistress of the moat-house since the
death of Lady Heredith, belonged to a bygone and almost extinct type of
Englishwoman, the provincial great lady, local society leader, village
patroness, sportswoman, and church-woman in one, a type exclusively
English, taking several centuries to produce in its finished form. Miss
Heredith was an excellent, if somewhat terrific, specimen of the class.
She was tall and massive, with a large-boned face, tanned red with
country air, shrewd grey eyes looking out beneath thick eyebrows which
met across her forehead in a straight line (the Heredith eyebrows) and a
strong, hooked nose (the Heredith falcon nose). But in spite of her
massive frame, red face, hooked nose, and countrified attire, she looked
more in place with the surroundings than the frailer and paler specimens
of womanhood to whom she was dispensing tea. There was a stiff and
stately grace in her movements, a slow ceremoniousness, in her
politeness to her guests, which seemed to harmonize with the
seventeenth-century setting of the moat-house garden.

At the moment the ladies were discussing an event which had been
arranged for that night: a country drive, to be followed by a musical
evening and dance. The invitations had been issued by the Weynes, a
young couple