Squire at the Manor House, known as “our Squire,” not out of any particular affection or respect, but in contradistinction to the richer and more important squire in a neighbouring parish, was at that time unmarried, though verging on middle age, and his mother still reigned as Lady of the Manor. Two or three times a year she called at the school to examine the needlework, a tall, haughty, and still handsome old dame in a long, flowing, pale-grey silk dust cloak and small, close-fitting, black bonnet, with two tiny King Charles’s spaniels on a leash.

It would be almost impossible for any one born in this century to imagine the pride and importance of such small country gentlepeople in the ‘eighties. As far as was known, the Bracewells were connected with no noble family; they had but little land, kept up but a small establishment, and were said in the village and hamlet to be “poor as crows.” Yet, by virtue of having been born into a particular caste and of living in the ‘big house’ of the parish, they expected to reign over their poorer neighbours and to be treated by them with the deference due to royalty. Like royalty, too, they could be charming to those who pleased them. Those who did not had to beware.

A good many of the cottagers still played up to them, the women curtseying to the ground when their carriage passed and speaking in awed tones in their presence. Others, conscious of their own independence—for none of the hamlet people worked on their land or occupied their cottages—and having breathed the new free air of democracy, which was then beginning to percolate even into such remote places, were inclined to laugh at their pretensions. “We don’t want nothin’ from they,” they would say, “and us shouldn’t get it if us did. Let the old gal stay at home and see that her own tea-caddy’s kept locked up, not come nosing round here axin’ how many spoonsful we puts in ours.”

Mrs. Bracewell knew nothing of such speeches. If she had, she would probably have thought the world—her world—was coming to an end. Which it was. In her girlhood under the Regency, she had been taught her duty towards the cottagers, and that included reproving them for their wasteful habits. It also included certain charities. She was generous out of all proportion to her small means; keeping two aged women pensioners, doling out soup in the winter to those she called “the deserving poor,” and entertaining the school-children to a tea and a magic-lantern entertainment every Christmas.