The book begins: On a beautiful September afternoon, in a handsome room of one of the grand, uptown hotels in New York, sat Mrs. Cliff, widow and millionaire. Widow of a village merchant, mistress of an unpretending house in the little town of Plainton, Maine, and, by strange vicissitudes of fortune, the possessor of great wealth, she was on her way from Paris to the scene of that quiet domestic life to which, for nearly thirty years, she had been accustomed.