“That’s what makes him want to pull things down,” said Birds, following vaguely the train of thought. “He can destroy all right; he makes you think nothing’s up to much. But he doesn’t give you anything instead. Lord! I wish I’d been a bit quicker and caught him before he went through the window.”
He strolled whistling away into his own room.
CHAPTER III
THE big loggia at Grote was set into the house; the dining-room lay along one side of it, the Italian drawing-room along the other, and a door in the inner wall of it communicated with the entrance hall. The open front was supported by six Corinthian columns, two set against the side walls, while the other four divided into equal spaces its frieze of metopes and triglyphs. It was raised a couple of steps above the broad gravel walk which ran along the southern façade of the house, and bordered the lawn. On the other side of that was the stone-balustraded terrace which fringed the edge of the beech-clad hill that plunged steeply down into the Thames valley. A broad opening had been cut through these woods opposite the centre of the terrace, and from the iron gates there you could look down on the mirror of the stream below which reflected the roofs and orchards of the village opposite. They were still milky-green with the verdure of the spring, and ran on past the house and formed the broad, mile-long avenue that led to the high-road beyond the park-gates.
The loggia gave the impression of great space and coolness on this broiling June afternoon. It was floored with squares of black and white marble, over which were laid some half dozen big Persian rugs, but the walls were bare save for panels framed in stone wreaths of fruit and flowers. In the centre of it stood a long dining-table, from a corner of which lunch had only recently been cleared away, and Lady Grote and a couple of friends who had arrived with her that morning, were lounging in a group of easy chairs that stood just inside the strip of sunlight lying along the edge of the steps.
Lady Grote had just rejoined the other two after seeing off Mr. Stoughton, the inexorable Socialist who had also lunched with her, and had now returned to London.
“He practically told me that Grote and I were thieves,” she remarked rather plaintively. “He said that all this”—and she indicated the surroundings—“really belonged to the human race in general and not to us. We had stolen it.”
“If you are thieves,” said Lord Thorley in his calm, philosophical voice, “then he is the receiver of stolen goods. He ate and drank in your pilferings with immense appetite.”
“I know. I thought it was not quite consistent of him. And he has gone to the station in the Rolls-Royce of which I have robbed him and others. But after all, why be consistent? Gracie is consistent, but I can’t think of anybody else who is.”
Lady Massingberd stirred gently in her chair.