Lionel swung and fired. The pheasant fell, upon which he was seized with a wild joy. The pheasants were breaking out fast. He could not keep from smiling. They were breaking out in two directions, over the ride and over the Park. He shot them, smiling. Two shots, a change of gun, two more shots; each shot brought down a bird. Percy trembled like a whippet straining to pursue a hare, everything concentrated on the reloading of the smoking barrels, the holding out of the gun exactly where the hands would reach for it. Lionel, his sense of glory endowing him with an extraordinary alertness, shot with complete carelessness and complete accuracy, Olivia beside him in what seemed to her a column of divine flame, hardly noticing the noise or the smell of cordite or the shouts and cries of the beaters or the continual thumps of birds falling dead on the grass all round her. She was absorbed in the wonder and amazement of her discovery, deaf to everything except the soundless shout of triumphant love.

Lionel’s concentration was nearly all on the physical process in which he was involved, but he had just enough consciousness to spare to entertain the thought as regards the birds of a kind of constant ‘Come on, come on,’ and beyond that an awareness that the urgency of the thing was because of the need to get the shooting over and turn back to look into Olivia’s eyes.

The slaughter slowed, and the shots became less frequent. Lionel picked off two latecomers trying to make a sideways dash out into the Park, then paused. One shot from further down the line, then silence. The beaters were out in the open, the dogs beginning their work. He handed his hot-barrelled gun to Percy Maidment and turned towards Olivia.

Percy, still trembling slightly as he began to relax, looked round at the grass thickly strewn with corpses. He exhaled slowly, with half a whistle, half a sigh.

‘Glory be to God,’ he said.

The guns gathered together to walk to the next stand.

‘Tremendous, that last drive,’ Bob Lilburn said to his host in congratulation.

‘It was good today, wasn’t it?’ said Sir Randolph. ‘Quite exciting.’

‘A bit too exciting for some people,’ said Gilbert Hartlip.

The three of them were walking together, a little apart from the others. Sir Randolph took Gilbert’s remark to be a reference to the number of birds he had had to let go because of a superfluity of opportunities.

‘I hope they weren’t coming over all together at your end,’ he said. ‘I have sometimes put the guns two deep, but I don’t think that would have been justified today, do you?’

‘There was nothing wrong with the placing of the guns. It was the way some of them were shooting.’

‘Really?’

‘Lionel Stephens seems rather a jealous shot.’

‘Lionel? I can’t believe it. He’s always the most sporting of shots.’

‘Not this afternoon I’m afraid. I really think I shall have to have a word with him about it.’