while her friend slumbered comfortably in her bed at Mena House, she
had set off, a self-conscious feeling of a truant schoolboy exalting
and yet frightening her.

Tamara was a widow. James Loraine had been everything that a thoroughly
respectable English husband ought to be. He had treated her with
kindness, he had given her a comfortable home--he had only asked her to
spend ten months of the year in the country, and he had never caused
her a moment's jealousy.

She could not remember her heart having beaten an atom faster--or
slower--for his coming or going. She had loved him, and her sisters and
brother, and father, all in the same devoted way, and when pneumonia
had carried him off nearly two years before, she had grieved with the
measure the loss of any one of them would have caused her--that was
sincerely and tenderly.

They were such a nice family, Tamara's!

For hundreds of years they had lived on the same land, doing their duty
to their neighbors and helping to form that backbone of England of
which we hear so much nowadays, in its passing away.

They had been members of Parliament, of solid Whig, and later of
Unionist, views. They had been staunch Generals, Chairmen of
Quarter-Sessions, riders to hounds, subscribers to charities, rigid
church-goers, disciplined, orthodox, worthy members of society.

Underdown was their name, and Underwood their home.