She had read it carefully to the end and had put it in her drawer without at first grasping the full meaning of the fact that, but for the activities of this same Mr.
Dalton, her dear mistress and her dear mistress's husband, Felix O'Day, and her dear mistress's father-in-law, the late Sir Carroll O'Day, would still be in possession of their ancestral estates and in undisturbed enjoyment of whatever happiness they, individually and collectively, could get out of life.
What the dear woman never knew, and it was just as well that she did not, were the special happenings which ended in the overwhelming catastrophe.
It really began with a tea basket, holding enough for two, which was opened one lovely afternoon under the big willows skirting that little strip of land bordering the backwater at Cookham-on-Thames.

My lady at the time was wearing a wide leghorn hat with blue ribbons that matched her eyes and set off the roses in her fair English cheeks.

Her companion was in white flannels--a muscular, well-set-up young man of thirty, fifteen years younger than her husband and with twice his charm--one of those delightful companions who possess the rare quality of making an hour seem but five minutes.

A gay party had dropped down the river in her father's launch, which had been tied up at Ferry Inn, and Dalton had insisted on taking my lady for just a half-hour's poling in a punt, Felix and the others preferring to take their tea at the Inn--plans readily agreed to and carried out, except that the half-hour prolonged itself into two whole ones.
Then there had come a week-end at Glenmore Castle and a garden party outside London, and then five-o'clock teas at half a dozen private houses, including one or two meetings a trifle more secluded.

And all quite as it should be, for a most desirable and valuable guest was this same Mr.Guy Dalton, a man received everywhere with open arms, as "one of the rising men of the time, my dear sir," a financier of distinction, indeed, and a promoter of such skill that he had only to issue a prospectus, or wink knowingly on the street, or take you aside at the club and whisper confidentially to you, when everything he had issued, winked at, or whispered about would go up with a rush, and countless men and women--a goodly number were women--would be hundreds, nay, thousands of pounds the richer before the week was out.
That his own buoyant imagination, as well as that of those who followed his lead, should have been stretched to the utmost was quite within the possibilities when one recollects that the basis of all this wealth was crude rubber, a substance of pronounced elasticity.