Stranleigh owns. I should have condemned those plans if they had been submitted to me at the first, and I shall condemn them now."
"What, without seeing them?" asked Stranleigh.
"I don't need to see them," replied the architect with some indignation. "I studied the buildings from the foundations until the roofs were on, and while they might answer very well for suburban villas, they are absurd as labourers' cottages."
"If you examined them, Mr. Cloisters, from the foundations upwards, would it not have been a neighbourly thing to drop me a note and call attention to the fact that these plans had not been submitted to you?"
"That had nothing to do with me."
"Oh, I'm not complaining, Mr. Cloisters. I am merely suggesting."
"It is none of my business to prevent you from breaking the law, Lord Stranleigh."
"True, true, Mr. Cloisters, and I have already apologised for this lapse, which, after all, was not my own doing."
"A prisoner in the dock of the New Bailey, my lord, may apologise, but his trial goes on just the same," said Mr. Timmins, the lawyer.
"Do you suggest that I am a prisoner in the dock, Mr. Timmins?"
"I don't suggest anything. I say you are a law-breaker."
