“Oh!  I say,” broke in Frank Leven, who could really bear it no longer.  “Now look here, Miss Boyce,—­what do you think Mr. Hallin wants?  It is just sheer lunacy—­it really is—­though I know I’m impertinent, and he’s a great man.  But I do declare he wants Aldous to give up a big common there is—­oh! over beyond Girtstone, down in the plain—­on Lord Maxwell’s estate, and make a labourers’ shoot of it!  Now, I ask you!  And he vows he doesn’t see why they shouldn’t rear pheasants if they choose to club and pay for it.  Well, I will say that much for him, Aldous didn’t see his way to that, though he isn’t the kind of Conservative I want to see in Parliament by a long way.  Besides, it’s such stuff!  They say sport brutalises us, and then they want to go and contaminate the labourer.  But we won’t take the responsibility.  We’ve got our own vices, and we’ll stick to them; we’re used to them; but we won’t hand them on:  we’d scorn the action.”

The flushed young barbarian, driven to bay, was not to be resisted.  Marcella laughed heartily, and Hallin laid an affectionate hand on the boy’s shoulder, patting him as though he were a restive horse.

“Yes, I remember I was puzzled as to the details of Hallin’s scheme,” said Aldous, his mouth twitching.  “I wanted to know who was to pay for the licences; how game enough for the number of applicants was to be got without preserving; and how men earning twelve or fourteen shillings a week were to pay a keeper.  Then I asked a clergyman who has a living near this common what he thought would be the end of it.  ‘Well,’ he said, ’the first day they’d shoot every animal on the place; the second day they’d shoot each other.  Universal carnage—­I should say that would be about the end of it.’  These were trifles, of course—­details.”

Hallin shook his head serenely.

“I still maintain,” he said, “that a little practical ingenuity might have found a way.”

“And I will support you,” said Wharton, laying down the paper-knife and bending over to Hallin, “with good reason.  For three years and a few months just such an idea as you describe has been carried out on my own estate, and it has not worked badly at all.”

“There!” cried Marcella.  “There!  I knew something could be done, if there was a will.  I have always felt it.”

She half turned to Aldous, then bent forward instead as though listening eagerly for what more Wharton might say, her face all alive, and eloquent.

“Of course, there was nothing to shoot!” exclaimed Frank Leven.

“On the contrary,” said Wharton, smiling, “we are in the middle of a famous partridge country.”

“How your neighbours must dote on you!” cried the boy.  But Wharton took no notice.