Grant Allen 
The British Barbarians [EPUB ebook] 

A gentlemanly clerk in Her Majesty's Civil Service, Philip Christy. He had traveled to Brackenhurst, Surrey, in the early morning on a fast train to meet his sister Frida and her husband Robert Monteith. While waiting for the churchgoers to go, Bertram Ingledew was thinking in the drawing room about certain practices that were comparable to those he had encountered or read about during his research in other places. Bertram Ingledew, a landowner who owned more dilapidated houses and maintained more pheasants than anybody else (save the duke) near Brackenhurst, captured the hearts of Philip Christy and Frida Monteith. The lowest and most animalistic of all the horrible emotions that man still inherited from apes and tigers drove Robert Monteith insane. He thus bent over the body with curiously hungry eyes after exacting his full measure of burning vengeance on the guy who had never hurt him, hoping to see some gory mark of his guilt on it. His pride actively struggled against itself in this situation. That is how savages behave. He was even more willing to patch up a temporary nominal reunion after learning that the guy who had abducted his wife was not a real live man of flesh and blood at all, but rather an evanescent phantom of the twenty-fifth century.