His Hour
Page 4She 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
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
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
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.