She half smiled when she thought of Millicent Hardcastle's face when

she had first suggested it.

"My dear Tamara, what--what an extraordinary thing for a woman to do!

Go to the Sphinx all alone at two o'clock in the morning. Would not

people think it very strange?"

Tamara felt a qualm for a second, but was rebellious.

"Well, perhaps--but do you know, Millicent, I believe I don't care.

That carven block of stone has had a curious effect upon me. It has

made me think as I have never done before. I want to take the clearest

picture away with me--I must go."

And even Mrs. Hardcastle's mild assertion that it could equally well be

viewed and studied at a more reasonable hour did not move Tamara, and

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.

That Tamara should have been given that Russian appellation, in a group

of Gladys, Mabels and Dorothys, must have surely indicated that fate

meant her to follow a line not quite so mapped out as that of her

sisters'. The very manner of her entry into the world was not in

accordance with the Underdown plan.

Her mother, Lady Gertrude Underdown, had contracted a friendship with

the wife of the First Secretary of the Russian Embassy.




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