Page:The Beauforts.djvu/8

INN LN^NSONI3 2 turning in life. He walked up two or three shallow steps to the suburban villa in Bays- water where he lived, and opened his own hall door with a latch-key. The house bore all the evidence of belonging to the cheap suburban class. The entrance-hall was extremely narrow, and the stairs which led to the storey above both narrow and steep. The ground floor was arranged after the method of thousands of other similar houses —namely, a drawing-room to the front, and a dining-room to the back— the two divided by folding doors. The drawing-room had a bay-window, through which the sun was now sending floods of yellow light ; the dining room had French window-doors, which opened on to steps leading into a dreary little square of ground, called, for the sake of the name, a garden. Nothing could be more commonplace than the house, nothing more absolutely every day than its arrangements, and Mr. Beaufort entered it now with one of his habitual sighs. He was an ambitious man, and considered that