"Maybe you know what I ought to say better than the Gover'ment."
CHAPTER X
When the ordeal at the police station came to an end, every person there was extremely on edge—except, you'd say, Miss von Schwarzenberg. Her dignity under the ordeal would forever, Napier told himself, count in his mind to Miss Greta's credit. Going home, she soothed the ruffled spirits of Miss Nan; she was tender, reassuring; she smiled.
Before the party had left the dinner table that night, Julian Grant walked in. He had arrived late and put up at the Essex Arms.
"I shall complain to his mother about him when I see her," Lady McIntyre threatened. They all fell to congratulating Julian upon his parents' arrival in London. The fact of their belated and difficult return from Germany had been duly chronicled in the newspapers, together with hints of the unsuitable treatment to which Sir James and Lady Nicholson Grant had been subjected. But if, as was plainly the case, some of the Lamborough party waited eagerly to hear the horrid details, Julian seemed to have no mind to make the most of his opportunities.
"I suppose they told you all about it?" Sir William made no more effort than Madge to disguise his desire to know the worst.
"Oh, they told me one or two things. It's been no worse for them than for some of the foreigners over here," was the unfilial answer which Napier challenged on other grounds. Napier had the facts of the ill-treatment of English Kurgäst from the Foreign Office.
Julian lolled in his chair. People made a great deal of a little inconvenience, he said, especially the type of person who was a Kurgäst. It was a speech that did him no good in that company—being far too much like a reflection upon a highly esteemed pair of whom their son should speak with an even greater respect than the ordinary person.
Napier, who knew Julian's devotion to his parents, was morally certain that Lady McIntyre was thinking at that moment of those shining lights of filial duty, Mr. Carl and Mr. Ernst Pforzheim. They would never cast such a reflection upon their revered Papa as to suggest he was a little fussy about small comforts. No, it wasn't nice of Julian.