Cornelius walked slowly forward, his gaze fixed straight ahead.

‘Fetch that man up here, would you,’ said Sir Randolph quietly to Charlie Pass.

At the same time Glass, who from the end of the line of beaters had seen Cornelius set off from the shelter of the trees and had immediately shouted to Walter Weir to move over so as to take his own place, broke out of the wood at a run. Walter, sober now and anxious to redeem himself, moved over quickly, calling out to the man next to him to fill the gap. Glass ran heavily towards Cornelius, reaching him at the same moment as Charlie Pass; each seized one of the intruder’s arms.

‘Let me go!’

Waving his banner wildly in the air Cornelius resisted their attempts to march him towards Sir Randolph.

‘Let me go I say!’

The sound of his own voice, high and nervous, struck him immediately as inadequate. They were pushing him about, making firm but reassuring noises as if he were a bullock that had strayed into the wrong field.

He made an effort to speak louder and lower.

‘Leave me alone!’

‘Can’t do that, for your own safety, sir,’ said Glass, no less firmly but slightly more respectfully; he had noticed the educated accent. ‘If you’ll just come along and have a word with Sir Randolph now, that would be the best thing.’

Lord Lilburn and Tommy Farmer, in front of whom the altercation was taking place, had both hesitated for some minutes in their shooting, partly because their concentration had been broken by the interruption and partly because they wanted to make sure that they were not likely to hit anybody by mistake, but now reassured by the sight of Glass and realizing that shots aimed at birds so high above the heads of the men in front of them were no serious danger to the latter, they turned their attention back to the pheasants. None of the other guns had faltered. The noise and the continuous light rain of falling shot all round them, as well as the danger of being hit on the head by a dead or dying bird, weakened Cornelius’s resolve. He allowed the two men to propel him in the direction of Sir Randolph, who though deprived of his chief loader was still picking off most of such pheasants as escaped the fire of Gilbert Hartlip and Bob Lilburn. As they passed Gilbert Hartlip, his loader Albert Jarvis, though fully occupied and indeed trembling with the keenness of his concentration, still had time to mutter out of the corner of his mouth with a sibilant viciousness which surprised Cornelius, ‘Silly sodding bugger.’

Sir Randolph lowered his gun and looked at Cornelius.

‘You don’t approve of our sport, I fear.’

‘It is not my idea of sport. It is my idea of murder.’

‘Ah yes. That’s all right, Glass. We’ll go on down to the boat-house when this drive is over. You’ve caught us just at the end of our murderous morning, sir, and we’re about to join the rest of our party for our ill-earned lunch. Tell me, are you from these parts? I don’t think we’ve met before, have we?’