As for Robert Monteith, he smiled the grim smile of the wholly unfascinated.  He was a dour business man of Scotch descent, who had made his money in palm-oil in the City of London; and having married Frida as a remarkably fine woman, with a splendid figure, to preside at his table, he had very small sympathy with what he considered her high-flown fads and nonsensical fancies.  He had seen but little of the stranger, too, having come in from his weekly stroll, or tour of inspection, round the garden and stables, just as they were on the very point of starting for St. Barnabas:  and his opinion of the man was in no way enhanced by Frida’s enthusiasm.  “As far as I’m concerned,” he said, with his slow Scotch drawl, inherited from his father (for though London-born and bred, he was still in all essentials a pure Caledonian)—­“As far as I’m concerned, I haven’t the slightest doubt but the man’s a swindler.  I wonder at you, Frida, that you should leave him alone in the house just now, with all that silver.  I stepped round before I left, and warned Martha privately not to move from the hall till the fellow was gone, and to call up cook and James if he tried to get out of the house with any of our property.  But you never seemed to suspect him.  And to supply him with a bag, too, to carry it all off in!  Well, women are reckless!  Hullo, there, policeman;—­stop, Price, one moment;—­I wish you’d keep an eye on my house this morning.  There’s a man in there I don’t half like the look of.  When he drives away in a cab that my boy’s going to call for him, just see where he stops, and take care he hasn’t got anything my servants don’t know about.”

In the drawing-room, meanwhile, Bertram Ingledew was reflecting, as he waited for the church people to clear away, how interesting these English clothes-taboos and day-taboos promised to prove, beside some similar customs he had met with or read of in his investigations elsewhere.  He remembered how on a certain morning of the year the High Priest of the Zapotecs was obliged to get drunk, an act which on any other day in the calendar would have been regarded by all as a terrible sin in him.  He reflected how in Guinea and Tonquin, at a particular period once a twelvemonth, nothing is considered wrong, and everything lawful, so that the worst crimes and misdemeanours go unnoticed and unpunished.  He smiled to think how some days are tabooed in certain countries, so that whatever you do on them, were it only a game of tennis, is accounted wicked; while some days are periods of absolute licence, so that whatever you do on them, were it murder itself, becomes fit and holy.  To him and his people at home, of course, it was the intrinsic character of the act itself that made it right or wrong, not the particular day or week or month on which one happened to do it.  What was wicked in June was wicked still in October.  But not so among the unreasoning devotees of taboo, in Africa or in England.