Come into my Parlour Read Online Free PDF Page B

was a traitor to her country; but expediency demands that I should leave her and her lover to your tender mercies. I pray that God may cheat you in the end and bring: them death more swiftly than you would desire.”

Chapter III

The Fly
    â€œWell, glad to see you, my boy. Here’s how!” Sir Pellinore Gwaine-Cust raised his silver tankard to Gregory Sallust and took a long swig at the champagne that it contained.
    â€œCheers!” murmured Gregory, taking a somewhat more modest pull at his tankard of the freshly iced wine.
    â€œDon’t sip it as though you were a deb. at her first dance, man,” chid the elderly Baronet disapprovingly. “Only way to get the full flavour of this stuff is to take the first half-tankard non-stop.”
    â€œI agree; but it’s too precious to treat like that in these days; unless, of course”—Gregory’s saturnine features lit up with a sudden grin—“one happens to be a munitions magnate trying to work off excess profits through the old expense account.”
    Sir Pellinore’s bright blue eyes opened wide with indignation. “Insolent young devil!” he boomed. “How dare you make your dirty cracks at me! Admittedly I’ve a few shares in one or two companies, but what the Government doesn’t take off us to pay for the war wouldn’t keep a baby in napkins. I’m living on capital. Only thing to do unless I gave up Gwaine Meads and this place. And at my age I’ll be jiggered if I move into some poky little flat.”
    They were sitting out on the terrace behind Sir Pellinore’s London mansion, and Gregory glanced up at the great pillared façade that rose behind them. Its cream paint looked grimy in the July sunshine, and here and there it had been scarred by bomb splinters. The windows of the big library that opened on to the terrace had been shattered and were now boarded over; a large chunk of the stone balustrade had fallen on to the public footway below, leaving an ugly gap. But he had known the house well in peacetime, and recalled its splendid staircase lit with great crystal chandeliers and thronged with distinguished people, while a string band played softly in the distance and a score of liveried footmen served the guests with every delicacy that money could provide.
    Even now, in war-scarred London, he felt that there were many worse places to live in than Carlton House Terrace, with its beautifulview over St. James’s Park. To the right, at the extremity of the double avenue of The Mall, the upper storeys of Buckingham Palace rose white above the fresh green of the tree-tops. In the left foreground stood the Admiralty, Horse Guards Parade, the back of No. 10, the Foreign Office, and the Offices of the War Cabinet. Between them a constant stream of little figures was weaving to and fro, mainly Naval, Army and Air Force officers hurrying from conference to conference, at which the next moves in the war would be planned, while in the very centre of the scene lay the green sward, made coloured with flower-beds and girls’ summer dresses; and the lovely tree-fringed lake, upon which swam flotillas of bright-winged ducks, and where the three white pelicans gravely stood knee-deep in water for hours on end—so inanimate, but apparently wise, that they had irrelevantly been nicknamed “The Three Chiefs of Staff”.
    Who, Gregory wondered, with a war in progress, would willingly live anywhere but here, right in the vortex of the cyclone, or, in peacetime, not prefer the outlook on this ancient Royal pleasance to a view over some dusty London square?
    He glanced at his companion. Sir Pellinore stood six-feet-four in his socks, and his limbs were big in proportion. He was now over seventy, but he could still have thrown most men of thirty down his staircase. His bright blue eyes were full of animation and his great white cavalry moustache flared up across the rubicund cheeks that it