After a light dinner she took out the letter she had received two nights before, spread the foolscap on her desk and examined it carefully. It was a queer story she read, even in the stilted terminology of an elderly country parson, who employed such words as “primogeniture,” and felt it necessary to sprinkle his pages with quotations from Horace, mostly in Latin. The writer was the vicar of a small Devonshire parish near Budleigh Salterton, and he had, as he said in a preliminary flourish, “reached the fourscore of the prophet.” He wasted a page in explaining how he came to reach these years, and employed “_mens sana in corpore sano_” at least twice in the first folio. He knew the Druze family very well; they lived in his village and had done so for hundreds of years. He himself had baptized Alice Mary Druze and Annie Emily Druze, and several other members of the Druze family which he thought it was necessary to enumerate by their full names; it had necessitated long researches in ancient registers. The Druze family had for generations farmed some forty acres of poor land on the edge of Dartmoor. They were “a wild family with a bad history,” and here the reverend gentleman, who was also something of a scientist, branched away from the main track to a discourse upon heredity which would have done credit to a Lombroso. Old father Druze was a lunatic and had died mad; his grandfather had committed suicide; there was a record in the parish registry and a note that he had been buried at the crossroads, in the proper manner for such as take their lives; Druze’s grandmother had also a history of sorts. The clergyman remembered her as a “respectable woman,” though inclined to gayety, and he even felt it necessary to retail a hundred-year-old piece of scandal, something that had happened at Widdicombe Fair. Alice was illiterate; he had extracted a note of this fact from the register of the church school. Annie, on the other hand, was a diligent scholar “and showed surprising proficiency in the study of the so-called dead languages,” so that she “speedily secured a respectable situation with a haberdasher in Exeter, a Mr. Watson. She was a God-fearing young woman, a communicant, and eventually married a well-to-do farmer in the neighbourhood of Torquay.” The farmer’s name Leslie jotted down on her pad. The third of the daughters, Martha, was of an “exemplary character, though of no great educational attainments.” About her the clergyman was very explicit, for it was he who had obtained her a post first as stillroom maid at a Plymouth hospital, and afterward, on his recommendation, as a probationary nurse. It was believed that she went to South Africa and “married a prosperous carpenter.”