1
Those who had never before heard of Sir Aylmer Lancing or of Deryk are no more likely than I am to forget the excitement of the week that followed Raymond Stornaway’s death. That it lasted no more than a week was due to the number of competing claims on the public attention; but, between the Bloomsbury cocaine-prosecution and the Dawlish murder, half the papers were calling O’Rane’s heritage “romantic” and the other half “sensational”, while the conversation at every dinner-party that I attended came by divers ways to the unanimous conclusion that Sonia would now spend twelve hundred thousand pounds a year on feeding her friends. Before she had recovered from her first shock, I observed that she was considering bigger houses in other parts of London; on the morrow, when I dined—for the last time, as I vowed to myself—in Rutland Gate, Lady Dainton told me that she had never entertained any idea of selling Crowley Court; and, when I visited O’Rane to enquire if he needed help, he shewed me a pile, waist-high, of begging letters.