“You heard them?” he asked Mrs. Viveash. “What can they have to say to one another, I wonder, at this time of night?”
“And did you feel they were going to wake up?” Mrs. Viveash inquired.
“No,” said Gumbril Senior with candour.
“When we’ve finished,” Gumbril Junior spoke with his mouth full, “you must show Myra your model of London. She’d adore it—except that it has no electric sky-signs.”
His father looked all of a sudden very much embarrassed. “I don’t think it would interest Mrs. Viveash much,” he said.
“Oh, yes it would. Really,” she declared.
“Well, as a matter of fact it isn’t here.” Gumbril Senior pulled with fury at his beard.
“Not here? But what’s happened to it?”
Gumbril Senior wouldn’t explain. He just ignored his son’s question and began to talk once more about the starlings. Later on, however, when Gumbril and Mrs. Viveash were preparing to go, the old man drew him apart into a corner and began to whisper the explanation.
“I didn’t want to blare it about in front of strangers,” he said, as though it were a question of the housemaid’s illegitimate baby or a repair to the water-closet. “But the fact is, I’ve sold it. The Victoria and Albert had wind that I was making it; they’ve been wanting it all the time. And I’ve let them have it.”