"What do they say?" Lord Dredlinton asked eagerly. "They all leave off talking about it when I am round."
"Blooming mystery," the young man pronounced. "That's the conclusion every one seems to arrive at. A chap I know, whose chauffeur pals up with Rees' valet, told me that he's been having heaps of threatening letters from fellows who'd got the knock over the B. & I. He seemed to think they'd done him in."
Dredlinton shivered nervously.
"It's perfectly abominable," he declared. "Here we are supposed to have the finest police system in the world, and yet a man can disappear from his rooms in the very centre of London, and no one has even a clue as to what has become of him."
"Looks bad," Jimmy acknowledged.
"I don't understand much about business affairs," Sarah remarked, "but the B. & I. case does seem to be a remarkably unpopular undertaking."
Dredlinton kicked a footstool out of his way, frowning angrily.
"The B. & I. is only an ordinary business concern," he insisted. "We have a right to make money if we are clever enough to do it. We speculate in lots of other things besides wheat, and we have our losses to face as well as our profits. I believe that fellow Wingate is at the bottom of all this agitation. Just like those confounded Americans. Why can't they mind their own business!"
"It isn't very long," Josephine remarked drily, "since we were rather glad that America didn't mind her own business."
"Bosh!" her husband scoffed. "If English people are to be bullied and their liberty interfered with in this manner, we might as well have lost the war and become a German Colony."