“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——”