Crossword-Solution: LONGDEN 7 letters, 3 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 9

Presently the large door at the end of the room was thrown open and the immaculate Savage, who was acting as a kind of master of the ceremonies, announced in well-bred but penetrating tones, “Lady Longden and the Honourable Miss Holmes.” I stared, like everybody else, but for a while her ladyship filled my eye.

Savage, who evidently had been looking out for her future ladyship, conducted us to our places, which were upon the left of Lord Ragnall, who sat at the head of the broad table with Lady Longden on his right.

Who, for instance, could conceive that persons so utterly different in every way as Lady Longden and her daughter, Miss Holmes, could be mother and child? Our bodies, no doubt, we do inherit from our ancestors, but not our individualities.

After this, leaving the inquiry in the hands of the British Consul and a firm of French lawyers, although in truth all hope had gone, I returned to England whither I had already sent Lady Longden, broken-hearted, for it occurred to me as possible that my wife might have drifted or been taken thither.

The Colonial Office, knowing little and caring less about that noble jewel in the British Crown, sent out as successor to so brilliant and successful an administrator--whom? One Sir James Robert Longden, a gentleman without initiative, without courage, and, above all, with a slavish adherence to red-tape and a clerk-like dread of compromising his berth.