CHAPTER III.
HIS PEOPLE
It so happened that his people in Leicestershire were thinking of him. They had been talking about him at the very time of the boy’s inconceivable meanderings in Hyde Park. And two of them were at it still.
On a terrace outside lighted windows a powerful young fellow, in a butterfly collar and a corded smoking jacket, was walking up and down with a tall girl not unlike him in the face; but their faces were only to be seen in glimpses as they passed the drawing-room windows, and at not less regular intervals when a red light in the sky, the source of which was concealed by the garden foliage, became positively brilliant. The air was sweet with the scent of honeysuckle and musk-roses and mown grass; midges fretted in and out of the open windows. But for the lurid lighting of the sky, with its Cyclopean suggestion of some mammoth forge, you were in the heart of England undefiled.
“It’s no use our talking about Tony,” the tall girl said. “I think you’re frightfully down on him; we shall never agree.”
“Not as long as you make a fool of the fellow,” said the blunt young man.
“Tony’s no fool,” remarked Lettice Upton, irrelevantly enough.
“You know what I mean,” snapped her brother Horace. “He’s being absolutely spoilt, and you’re at the bottom of it.”
“I didn’t give him asthma!”
“Don’t be childish, Letty.”
“But that’s what’s spoiling his life.”