MRS LANSDOWN and her daughter were people who lived as naturally in three rooms as they would have lived in a town house with twenty. A frail woman of remarkable beauty, Sybil’s mother had had both experiences. There was a time of affluence when Gregory Lansdown had his thousand acres in Berkshire, a shoot in Norfolk, and a salmon river in Scotland, to say nothing of his handsome little house in Chelsea. But those possessions, with his racing stable, his steam yacht and the yearly trip to Algeria, had gone in a night. He was a director of a company that went into liquidation, following the hurried departure of a managing director who went eventually to prison. The directors were called upon to make good the best part of a million and a half, and Gregory Lansdown was the only one of them wh
