Lord Ellerdine saw the placards also. "Sickening, isn't it?" he said, with a real note of pain in his voice. "Poor little Peggy! Poor little girl! I would have done anything to stop it, Adams; and in half an hour—these newspaper fellows are so damned clever—in half an hour there'll be all about the last scene, the letter and all that. By the time we get back to town"—Lord Ellerdine didn't imagine that he was really in London at the moment,—"by the time we get back to town it will be in all the clubs just as it has come over the tape machines for the last two hours, only with further details—how Peggy looked and all that. Sickening!"
Colonel Adams agreed. He did not in the least know what his rather fatuous friend was about to propose or had in his mind; but he was, at anyrate, glad of his companionship, weary and unhappy as he felt at the terrible spectacle which he had found almost impossible to endure.
"I could kill that man Robert Fyffe," he said savagely as they walked slowly eastwards. "Great, big, damned bully, I call him."
"Well, I know him," Ellerdine replied; "and really, Adams, he is quite a decent chap in private life. It is his job, you know, and he has got to do it as well as he can. I believe he gets about a hundred a day or more for a case like this."
"Filthy cruelty, I call it," Adams answered, "whether he is a decent chap or not. To be paid—to earn your living, by Gad!—to torture men and women like that seems to me a low way of earning your bread-and-butter."
"Perhaps it is," the other replied. "At the same time, Adams, it might be said of your job too. That Afghan business, when there was no quarter, that you were in: there were a whole lot of sentimentalists in the Radical press that howled and held you up to execration as a sort of Pontius Pilate with a flavour of Nero, at home. You were out there doing the work. I was home and read the papers—you didn't. Bally monster, they called you—what?"
"Damn all newspaper writers!" the old white-haired colonel growled. "But I say, Ellerdine, what about this cup of tea?"
Lord Ellerdine looked round anxiously, and then his face lighted up. "Here's an A.B.C.," he said, pointing to some adjacent windows covered with letters in white enamel and displaying buns and pastry.
"How will this do, old chap?"
The soldier nodded, and together the two men entered the shop.