Braxfield, who had been butler to Sir Anthony Markenmore, Baronet, of Markenmore Court, for thirty years, was a man of method. All his life he had cultivated the habit of doing certain things at certain times: the older he grew (and he was now a little over sixty) the more this habit grew upon him. Virtually, he was master of the house; Sir Anthony was an invalid who kept his room; Mr. Guy Markenmore, the elder son, had never crossed his father’s threshold for some years; Mr. Harry Markenmore, the younger son, preferred anybody but himself to exercise merely domestic authority; Miss Valencia Markenmore, the only daughter, had been but recently released from the schoolroom; accordingly, Braxfield, one way and another, and without seeming to do so, wielded a mild, unobtrusive autocracy. He had many good rules, and some others that were little better than fads—amongst the last was his trick of locking up the house at precisely eight o’clock every evening. Had anybody questioned Braxfield as to this curious regulation, the old butler would have given what he believed to be good reasons for his insistence upon it. Markenmore Court was a very old and a very large house, originally built in the last years of Queen Elizabeth, added to during the reign of Charles the Second, and finally restored and modernized in the time of George the Fourth. It stood on the slope of a gently-rising hill, a mile out of a village which had taken its name from the Markenmore family—a family that had been settled in those parts since the early days of the Norman Conquest; with the exception of a lodge at the entrance gates, there was no dwelling very near it. It possessed an unusual number of doors; doors opening on the terrace, on the courtyard, on the gardens, on the lawns, on the stables, on private walks that wound through the thick shrubberies; it had also corridors, galleries, chambers, little used by the family and the servants. The family was small; the servants were few; for the Markenmores were comparatively poor, and kept up next to nothing of their ancient state. But poor though they were, they possessed a considerable share of gold and silver plate, of rare china, of valuable glass; there were also pictures in the house that were worth a fortune, and there was scarcely an apartment in which some easily removable thing that would have fetched a handsome price in the sale-room was not openly displayed.