The Door With Seven Locks by Edgar Wallace

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 whose property was in his own name. He paid to the last farthing and died before the last payment was completed.

The Lansdowns retained one asset--the house in which they were now living, and which had been divided up into three self-contained flats before the blow fell. Into one of these, the smallest, Mrs Lansdown carried such of her personal belongings as she could salvage from the wreck of fortune. They were sitting together on the night after Sybil's return, the mother reading, Sybil writing at the little escritoire in the corner of the sitting-room. Presently Mrs Lansdown put down her book.