Page:The Duke Decides (1904).djvu/91





the famous white drawing-room at Beaumanoir House Sybil Hanbury was preparing to end a solitary evening by the simple process of going to bed. The butler, a martyr to punctilio, had insisted on lighting every jet in the chandeliers and in the sconces on the walls, with the result that the vast apartment scintillated like a ball-room, accentuating the loneliness of the black-clad little figure of its sole occupant.

Sybil laid aside her book, and surveyed the splendid emptiness of the room with a smile of amusement for her monopoly of so much gorgeously upholstered space. But as she realized that her monopoly of the white drawing-room was only a detail in the much larger incongruity of her monopoly of the Piccadilly mansion, her face took a graver look.

“I trust that the Vincents will be ready to take me in next week,” she mused with a touch of impatience. “The idea of a score of ser-