"But I didn't take any account of them at first. I put out my stick across the water to lay hold of some of the lilies, when what does the fattish man do but shout out, "If you do it, I'll skin you!" I didn't choose to notice his nonsense, and I'd just got hold of a lily, when what do I see but him with a gun at his shoulder firin' straight at me. So, as I say, I came away like a beast through the bushes."
Mr. Rodney seemed perfectly at ease.
"Mr. Lite always is a little hasty," he said. "The matter is perfectly clear to me. He doesn't like anything being interfered with."
"A defender of the rights of property," said the Duke approvingly. "A good Conservative."
"Still, he goes too far," said Mrs. Verulam, in considerable agitation. "Mr. Rodney, I must ask you to be kind enough to tell Mr. Lite that I cannot have my house-party shot at. Make it perfectly clear, please. As a hostess, I cannot and will not permit anything of that kind."
"Certainly, certainly," said Mr. Rodney; "I see your point of view."
"If you won't have any more tea, it would be very good of you to go to the fishing-cottage at once," said Mrs. Verulam. "Some of us might like to stroll about the grounds presently, and I am sure we shall all prefer to have Mr. Lite's solemn promise of amendment before we do so."
These words were received with an emphatic chorus of unfeigned assent, so poor Mr. Rodney, who had only half finished his first cup, was obliged to get up and fare forth into the afternoon. He went gloomily, feeling that his Ascot this year was evidently to be a period of hard labour, and that Mrs. Verulam, like many women, was inclined to make mountains out of mole-hills. Not that James Bush could be accurately described as a mole-hill. Nevertheless, under the circumstances, Mr. Rodney's sympathies lay very decidedly with Mr. Lite. Indeed, as he walked tealess in the sun, he gradually worked himself up into a perfect fever of perfervid pity for the wrongs of the outraged exile, practically homeless by the waterside, and forced to behold the assaults of such an enemy as the man who had so foully influenced Mrs. Verulam against society. Moved by this wild access of emotion, Mr. Rodney burst into the fishing-cottage like a well-bred volcano, leapt into the tiny parlour which for the moment accommodated the unfortunate Lites, and, seizing Mr. Lite by the hand, exclaimed in a voice that trembled with feeling:
"You have all my sympathy; I am entirely—entirely on your side. If you had hit him, I don't think I could blame you—I don't, indeed!"
The Bun Emperor, who had an enormous pair of strong field-glasses in one hand, and was in the very act of ringing the telephone-bell to summon Mr. Harrison with the other, looked for an instant petrified by this intrusion; and the Empress cried out in shrill alarm from her station in the minute bay-window built to fit a fisherman. Mr. Rodney breathlessly continued: