“Over the wall?” repeated the smiling old gentleman, still without letting his surprise come uppermost.

“I suppose I am not wrong, sir,” continued MacIan, “in supposing that these grounds inside the wall belong to you?”

The man in the panama looked at the ground and smoked thoughtfully for a few moments, after which he said, with a sort of matured conviction: 

“Yes, certainly; the grounds inside the wall really belong to me, and the grounds outside the wall, too.”

“A large proprietor, I imagine,” said Turnbull, with a truculent eye.

“Yes,” answered the old gentleman, looking at him with a steady smile.  “A large proprietor.”

Turnbull’s eye grew even more offensive, and he began biting his red beard; but MacIan seemed to recognize a type with which he could deal and continued quite easily: 

“I am sure that a man like you will not need to be told that one sees and does a good many things that do not get into the newspapers.  Things which, on the whole, had better not get into the newspapers.”

The smile of the large proprietor broadened for a moment under his loose, light moustache, and the other continued with increased confidence: 

“One sometimes wants to have it out with another man.  The police won’t allow it in the streets—­and then there’s the County Council—­and in the fields even nothing’s allowed but posters of pills.  But in a gentleman’s garden, now——­”

The strange gentleman smiled again and said, easily enough:  “Do you want to fight?  What do you want to fight about?”

MacIan had understood his man pretty well up to that point; an instinct common to all men with the aristocratic tradition of Europe had guided him.  He knew that the kind of man who in his own back garden wears good clothes and spoils them with a bad hat is not the kind of man who has an abstract horror of illegal actions of violence or the evasion of the police.  But a man may understand ragging and yet be very far from understanding religious ragging.  This seeming host of theirs might comprehend a quarrel of husband and lover or a difficulty at cards or even escape from a pursuing tailor; but it still remained doubtful whether he would feel the earth fail under him in that earthquake instant when the Virgin is compared to a goddess of Mesopotamia.  Even MacIan, therefore (whose tact was far from being his strong point), felt the necessity for some compromise in the mode of approach.  At last he said, and even then with hesitation: 

“We are fighting about God; there can be nothing so important as that.”

The tilted eye-glasses of the old gentleman fell abruptly from his nose, and he thrust his aristocratic chin so far forward that his lean neck seemed to shoot out longer like a telescope.

“About God?” he queried, in a key completely new.