Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Internet Archive) THE OSBORNES BY E. F. BENSON [Illustration: colophon] NEW YORK GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN COPYRIGHT, 1909, 1910, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY PUBLISHED, OCTOBER, 1910 THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y. THE OSBORNES CHAPTER I For the last five hours all the windows along the front of the newest and whitest and most pretentious and preposterous house in Park Lane had been blazing with lights, which were kindled while the last flames of the long July day had scarcely died down into the ash-coloured night, and were still shining when morning began to tinge the velvet gray of the sky with colour and extinguish the stars. The lights, however, in No. 92 seemed to be of more durable quality than the heavenly constellations and long after morning had come and the early traffic begun to boom on the roadway, they still burned with undiminished splendour. It was literally true, also, that all the windows in the long Gothic facade which seemed to have strayed from Nuremberg into the West End of London, had been ablaze; not only was the ground floor lit, and the first floor, where was the ballroom, out of which, all night, had floated endless webs of perpetual melody, but the bedrooms above, though sleep then would have been impossible, and, as a matter of fact, they were yet untenanted, had been equally luminous, while from behind the flamboyant balustrade the top of the house, smaller windows, which might be conjectured to belong to servants’ rooms, had joined in the general illumination. This was strictly in accordance with Mrs. Osborne’s orders, as given to that staid and remarkable person called by her (when she forgot) Willum and (when she remembered) Thoresby, and (also when she remembered) alluded to as “my major domo.” “Willum” he had been in earlier and far less happy years, first as boot boy, then when the family blossomed into footmen, as third, second, and finally first of his order. Afterward came things more glorious yet and Thoresby was major domo. At the present time Mrs. Osborne had probably forgotten that there existed such officers as boot boys, and Willum probably had forgotten too. The rise of the family had been remarkably rapid, but he had kept pace with it, and to-night he felt, as did Mrs. Osborne, that the eminence attained by them all was of a very exalted order.