CHAPTER VIII
The Cut Panel
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In 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-
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