Page:Herbert Jenkins - The Rain Girl.djvu/20

 "But, Richard, I don't understand." Mrs. Edward Seymour had puckered up her pretty, washed-out face. "Where are you going to, and what shall you do?"

"He wants to become a vagabond," snapped Lady Drewitt, "tramping from town to town, like those dreadful men we saw last week when motoring to Peterborough."

"I see;" but there was nothing in Mrs. Edward's tone suggestive of enlightenment.

"It's the war," announced Edward Seymour, a peevish-looking little man with no chin and a forehead that reached almost to the back of his neck, who by virtue of a post at the Ministry of Munitions had escaped the comb of conscription.

Lord Drewitt screwed his glass into his eye and gazed at Seymour with interest.

"Don't be a fool, Edward," snapped Lady Drewitt; and Mrs. Edward Seymour looked across at her husband, disapproval in her eye. It was hidden from none that the Seymours were "after the old bird's money," as Jimmy Pentland put it. It was he who had christened them "the Vultures," a name that had stuck.

"What do you propose to do when you have spent all your money?" Lady Drewitt had next demanded.

"In all probability," said Lord Drewitt, "he will get run in and come to us to bail him out. Personally I hate police-courts. I often wonder why they instruct magistrates in law at the expense of hygiene."