Love and Hatred by Marie Belloc Lowndes

Godfrey Pavely was standing in his private room at Pavely's Bank. It was only a little after ten, and he had not been in the room many minutes, yet already he had got up from his writing-table and moved over to the middle one of the three windows overlooking the prim, exquisitely kept walled garden, which even nowadays reminded him of his early childhood. He had gazed out of the window for a few moments, but now he stood with his back to the window, staring unseeingly before him, a piece of note paper crushed up in his hand.

For close on a hundred years his well-to-do careful-living forbears had passed their pleasant, uneventful lives in this spacious Georgian house, set in the centre of the wide High Street of the prosperous market town of Pewsbury.