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the following afternoon at tea-time four ladies were seated in the pleasant drawing-room of 140 Grosvenor Gardens, the residence of General Sadgrove, late of the Indian Staff Corps. Mrs. Sadgrove, a fair, plump, elderly dame, needs no special description, and two of the other tea-drinkers—Mrs. Senator Sherman, as she preferred to be called, and her daughter Leonie—we have met before.

The fourth occupant of the room—a girl dressed in deep mourning—was Sybil Hanbury, who had come to discuss her engagement to Alec Forsyth with her motherly old friend, Alec’s aunt by marriage, Mrs. Sadgrove. Owing to the recent deaths in her family the engagement was not to be publicly announced at present; but Sybil had no secrets from the Sadgroves, who had known her from a baby, long before she had been taken up, on the death of her parents, by her grandfather, the late Duke of Beaumanoir.