When Evadne arrived at Williamsburg in the autumn of 1938 as Stephen Sprague's bride, she knew that the lines of cousinship between the Days and the Spragues were linked by marriage, but the long family history was new to her. She noticed that Stephen's cousin, Jeff Day, a foreign correspondent in London, looked the image of the portrait of his eighteenth-century grandfather Julian. She discovered too, that the portrait of Grandfather Julian's wife, Tibby, looked exactly like her own niece, Mab, who, though she had never been to Williamsburg, at thirteen, knew the family chronicle by heart and had always been tremendously curious about the town where her ancestors had lived. It had often seemed to the family in England that in some strange way Mab could remember Williamsburg. This, the seventh novel in Miss Thane's enormously popular Williamsburg series, is nevertheless set in London during the heroic, nerve-racking years of 1938–41.
