Andrew put down the book he had been going through the motions of reading for the last half hour. For some reason, his mind refused to be deflected in the way that could usually be relied upon with Jane Austen. She was always his safe haven for an escape from the cares and the mundane concerns of daily life. This time, the world was insistent upon gaining his full attention. It was not that some major new problem had come to inhabit his mind; simply his periodic audit of what he was doing with his life, and whether he was being faithful to his vow to use his good fortune to ‘make a difference’, in words he had once heard from Princess Diana, when she launched the link between the Andrew Cowley Fund for HIV research, and the larger James Digby-Hayes AIDS Foundation.