women in objectionable black clothes, cringing lugubriously up the drive to the door. She wanted to set the dogs on them, ‘Hi Rip! Hi Ring! Ranger! At ‘em boys, set ‘em off.’ But Crowther, the butler, with all the rest of the servants, was Mr Crich’s man. Nevertheless, when her husband was away, she would come down like a wolf on the crawling supplicants;

‘What do you people want? There is nothing for you here. You have no business on the drive at all. Simpson, drive them away and let no more of them through the gate.’

The servants had to obey her. And she would stand watching with an eye like the eagle’s, whilst the groom in clumsy confusion drove the lugubrious persons down the drive, as if they were rusty fowls, scuttling before him.