“Why don’t the police make them go away?” said Lady Brandon, too excited to listen to her husband.
“Hush, Jane, pray. What can three men do against thirty or forty?”
“They ought to take up somebody as an example to the rest.”
“They have offered, in the handsomest manner, to arrest me if Sir Charles will give me in charge,” said Trefusis.
“There!” said Lady Jane, turning to her husband. “Why don’t you give him—or someone—in charge?”
“You know nothing about it,” said Sir Charles, vexed by a sense that she was publicly making him ridiculous.
“If you don’t, I will,” she persisted. “The idea of having our ground broken into and our new wall knocked down! A nice state of things it would be if people were allowed to do as they liked with other peoples’ property. I will give every one of them in charge.”
“Would you consign me to a dungeon?” said Trefusis, in melancholy tones.
“I don’t mean you exactly,” she said, relenting. “But I will give that clergyman into charge, because he ought to know better. He is the ringleader of the whole thing.”
“He will be delighted, Lady Brandon; he pines for martyrdom. But will you really give him into custody?”