“But it would be wrong to take it from them,” Philip cried, growing fiery red and half losing his temper, for he really believed it.  “It would be sheer confiscation; the land’s their own; they either bought it or inherited it from their fathers.  If you were to begin taking it away, what guarantee would you have left for any of the rights of property generally?”

“You didn’t recognise the rights of property of the fellow who killed the pheasant, though,” Bertram interposed, laughing, and imperturbably good-humoured.  “But that’s always the way with these taboos, everywhere.  They subsist just because the vast majority even of those who are obviously wronged and injured by them really believe in them.  They think they’re guaranteed by some divine prescription.  The fetich guards them.  In Polynesia, I recollect, some chiefs could taboo almost anything they liked, even a girl or a woman, or fruit and fish and animals and houses:  and after the chief had once said, ‘It is taboo,’ everybody else was afraid to touch them.  Of course, the fact that a chief or a landowner has bought and paid for a particular privilege or species of taboo, or has inherited it from his fathers, doesn’t give him any better moral claim to it.  The question is, ’Is the claim in itself right and reasonable?’ For a wrong is only all the more a wrong for having been long and persistently exercised.  The Central Africans say, ’This is my slave; I bought her and paid for her; I’ve a right, if I like, to kill her and eat her.’  The king of Ibo, on the West Coast, had a hereditary right to offer up as a human sacrifice the first man he met every time he quitted his palace; and he was quite surprised audacious freethinkers should call the morality of his right in question.  If you English were all in a body to see through this queer land-taboo, now, which drives your poor off the soil, and prevents you all from even walking at liberty over the surface of the waste in your own country, you could easily—­”

“Oh, Lord, what shall we do!” Philip interposed in a voice of abject terror.  “If here isn’t Sir Lionel!”

And sure enough, right across the narrow path in front of them stood a short, fat, stumpy, unimpressive little man, with a very red face, and a Norfolk jacket, boiling over with anger.

“What are you people doing here?” he cried, undeterred by the presence of a lady, and speaking in the insolent, supercilious voice of the English landlord in defence of his pheasant preserves.  “This is private property.  You must have seen the notice at the gate, ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted.’”

“Yes, we did see it,” Bertram answered, with his unruffled smile; “and thinking it an uncalled-for piece of aggressive churlishness, both in form and substance,—­why, we took the liberty to disregard it.”

Sir Lionel glared at him.  In that servile neighbourhood, almost entirely inhabited by the flunkeys of villadom, it was a complete novelty to him to be thus bearded in his den.  He gasped with anger.  “Do you mean to say,” he gurgled out, growing purple to the neck, “you came in here deliberately to disturb my pheasants, and then brazen it out to my face like this, sir?  Go back the way you came, or I’ll call my keepers.”