powers over the land you arrogate to yourself with a little more gentleness and common politeness?  How petty and narrow it looks to use even an undoubted right, far more a tribal taboo, in a tyrannical and needlessly aggressive manner!  How mean and small and low and churlish!  The damage we did your land, as you call it—­if we did any at all—­was certainly not a ha’pennyworth.  Was it consonant with your dignity as a chief in the tribe to get so hot and angry about so small a value?  How grotesque to make so much fuss and noise about a matter of a ha’penny!  We, who were the aggrieved parties, we, whom you attempted to debar by main force from the common human right to walk freely over earth wherever there’s nothing sown or planted, and who were obliged to remove you as an obstacle out of our path, at some personal inconvenience”—­(he glanced askance at his clothes, crumpled and soiled by Sir Lionel’s unseemly resistance)—­“We didn’t lose our tempers, or attempt to revile you.  We were cool and collected.  But a taboo must be on its very last legs when it requires the aid of terrifying notices at every corner in order to preserve it; and I think this of yours must be well on the way to abolition.  Still, as I should like to part friends”—­he drew a coin from his pocket, and held it out between his finger and thumb with a courteous bow towards Sir Lionel—­“I gladly tender you a ha’penny in compensation for any supposed harm we may possibly have done your imaginary rights by walking through the wood here.”

V

For a day or two after this notable encounter between tabooer and taboo-breaker, Philip moved about in a most uneasy state of mind.  He lived in constant dread of receiving a summons as a party to an assault upon a most respectable and respected landed proprietor who preserved more pheasants and owned more ruinous cottages than anybody else (except the duke) round about Brackenhurst.  Indeed, so deeply did he regret his involuntary part in this painful escapade that he never mentioned a word of it to Robert Monteith; nor did Frida either.  To say the truth, husband and wife were seldom confidential one with the other.  But, to Philip’s surprise, Bertram’s prediction came true; they never heard another word about the action for trespass or the threatened prosecution for assault and battery.  Sir Lionel found out that the person who had committed the gross and unheard-of outrage of lifting an elderly and respectable English landowner like a baby in arms on his own estate, was a lodger at Brackenhurst, variously regarded by those who knew him best as an escaped lunatic, and as a foreign nobleman in disguise, fleeing for his life from a charge of complicity in a Nihilist conspiracy:  he wisely came to the conclusion, therefore, that he would not be the first to divulge the story of his own ignominious defeat, unless he found that damned radical chap was going boasting around the countryside