“Perhaps you would like me to pass over it,” said Magnus, and although he was pretending to be solicitous I knew he was enjoying himself.

“Is it vital to your subtext?” said Ingestree, and he too was half joking.

“It is, really. But I don’t want to give pain, my dear fellow.”

“Don’t mind me. Worse things have happened since.”

“Perhaps I can be discreet,” said Magnus. “You may rely on me to be as tactful as possible.”

“For God’s sake don’t do that,” said Ingestree. “In my experience tact is usually worse than the brutalities of truth. Anyhow, my recollections of that play can’t be the same as yours. My troubles were mostly private.”

“Then I shall go ahead. But please feel free to intervene whenever you feel like it. Put me right on matters of fact. Even on shades of opinion. I make no pretence of being an exact historian.”

“Shoot the works,” said Ingestree. “I’ll be as still as a mouse. I promise.”

“As you wish. Well—The Master of Ballantrae was another of the Guvnor’s romantic specials. It too was from a novel, by somebody-or-other—”

“By Robert Louis Stevenson,” said Ingestree, in an undertone, “though you wouldn’t have guessed it from what appeared on the stage. These adaptations! Butcheries would be a better word—”

“Shut up, Roly,” said Kinghovn. “You said you’d be quiet.”

“I’m no judge of what kind of adaptation it was,” said Magnus, “because I haven’t read the book and I don’t suppose I ever will. But it was a good, tight, well-caulked melodrama, and people had been eating it up since the Guvnor first brought it out, which I gathered was something like thirty years before the time I’m talking about. I told you he was an experimenter and an innovator, in his day. Well, whenever he had lost a packet on Maeterlinck, or something new by Stephen Phillips, he would pull The Master out of the storehouse and fill up the bank-account again. He could go to Birmingham, and Manchester, and Newcastle, and Glasgow, and Edinburgh or any big provincial town—and those towns had big theatres, not like the little pill-boxes in London—and pack ’em in with the The Master. Especially Edinburgh, because they seemed to take the play for their own. Macgregor told me, ‘The Master’s been a mighty get-penny for Sir John.’ When you saw him in it you knew why it was so. It was made for him.”

“It certainly was,” said Ingestree. “Made for him out of the blood and bones of poor old Stevenson. I have no special affection for Stevenson, but he didn’t deserve that.”

“As you can see, it was a play that called forth strong feeling,” said Magnus. “I never read it, myself, because Macgregor always held the prompt-copy and did the prompting himself, if anybody was so absurd as to need prompting. But of course I picked up the story as we rehearsed.

“It had a nice meaty plot. Took place in Scotland around the middle of the eighteenth century. There had been some sort of trouble—I don’t know the details—and Scottish noblemen were divided in allegiance between Bonny Prince Charlie and the King of England. The play was about a family called Durie; the old Lord of Durrisdeer had two sons, the first-born being called the Master of Ballantrae and the younger being simply Mr Henry Durie. The old Lord decided on a sneaky compromise when the trouble came, and sent the Master off to fight for Bonny Charlie, while Mr Henry remained at home to be loyal to King George. On those terms, you see, the family couldn’t lose, whichever way the cat jumped.