“What right had you stunted German squires,” he cried, “to interfere in a quarrel between Scotch and English and Irish gentlemen?  Who made you, whose fathers could not splutter English while they walked in Whitehall, who made you the judge between the republic of Sidney and the monarchy of Montrose?  What had your sires to do with England that they should have the foul offering of the blood of Derwentwater and the heart of Jimmy Dawson?  Where are the corpses of Culloden?  Where is the blood of Lochiel?” MacIan advanced upon his opponent with a bony and pointed finger, as if indicating the exact pocket in which the blood of that Cameron was probably kept; and Edward VII fell back a few paces in considerable confusion.

“What good have you ever done to us?” he continued in harsher and harsher accents, forcing the other back towards the flower-beds.  “What good have you ever done, you race of German sausages?  Yards of barbarian etiquette, to throttle the freedom of aristocracy!  Gas of northern metaphysics to blow up Broad Church bishops like balloons.  Bad pictures and bad manners and pantheism and the Albert Memorial.  Go back to Hanover, you humbug?  Go to——­”

Before the end of this tirade the arrogance of the monarch had entirely given way; he had fairly turned tail and was trundling away down the path.  MacIan strode after him still preaching and flourishing his large, lean hands.  The other two remained in the centre of the lawn—­Turnbull in convulsions of laughter, the lunatic in convulsions of disgust.  Almost at the same moment a third figure came stepping swiftly across the lawn.

The advancing figure walked with a stoop, and yet somehow flung his forked and narrow beard forward.  That carefully cut and pointed yellow beard was, indeed, the most emphatic thing about him.  When he clasped his hands behind him, under the tails of his coat, he would wag his beard at a man like a big forefinger.  It performed almost all his gestures; it was more important than the glittering eye-glasses through which he looked or the beautiful bleating voice in which he spoke.  His face and neck were of a lusty red, but lean and stringy; he always wore his expensive gold-rim eye-glasses slightly askew upon his aquiline nose; and he always showed two gleaming foreteeth under his moustache, in a smile so perpetual as to earn the reputation of a sneer.  But for the crooked glasses his dress was always exquisite; and but for the smile he was perfectly and perennially depressed.

“Don’t you think,” said the new-comer, with a sort of supercilious entreaty, “that we had better all come into breakfast?  It is such a mistake to wait for breakfast.  It spoils one’s temper so much.”

“Quite so,” replied Turnbull, seriously.

“There seems almost to have been a little quarrelling here,” said the man with the goatish beard.

“It is rather a long story,” said Turnbull, smiling.  “Originally, it might be called a phase in the quarrel between science and religion.”