“Profit!” Peter Halket stared: “Why, it would profit everything. What makes Beit and Rhodes and Barnato so great? If you’ve got eight millions—”

“Peter Simon Halket, which of those souls you have seen on earth is to you greatest?” said the stranger, “Which soul is to you fairest?”

“Ah,” said Peter, “but we weren’t talking of souls at all; we were talking of money. Of course if it comes to souls, my mother’s the best person I’ve ever seen. But what does it help her? She’s got to stand washing clothes for those stuck-up nincompoops of fine ladies! Wait till I’ve got money! It’ll be somebody else then, who—”

“Peter Halket,” said the stranger, “who is the greatest; he who serves or he who is served?” Peter looked at the stranger: then it flashed on him that he was mad.

“Oh,” he said, “if it comes to that, what’s anything! You might as well say, sitting there in your old linen shirt, that you were as great as Rhodes or Beit or Barnato, or a king. Of course a man’s just the same whatever he’s got on or whatever he has; but he isn’t the same to other people.”

“There have kings been born in stables,” said the stranger.

Then Peter saw that he was joking, and laughed. “It must have been a long time ago; they don’t get born there now,” he said. “Why, if God Almighty came to this country, and hadn’t half-a-million in shares, they wouldn’t think much of Him.”

Peter built up his fire. Suddenly he felt the stranger’s eyes were fixed on him.

“Who gave you your land?” the stranger asked.

“Mine! Why, the Chartered Company,” said Peter.

The stranger looked back into the fire. “And who gave it to them?” he asked softly.

“Why, England, of course. She gave them the land to far beyond the Zambezi to do what they liked with, and make as much money out of as they could, and she’d back ‘em.”

“Who gave the land to the men and women of England?” asked the stranger softly.

“Why, the devil! They said it was theirs, and of course it was,” said Peter.

“And the people of the land: did England give you the people also?”

Peter looked a little doubtfully at the stranger. “Yes, of course, she gave us the people; what use would the land have been to us otherwise?”

“And who gave her the people, the living flesh and blood, that she might give them away, into the hands of others?” asked the stranger, raising himself.

Peter looked at him and was half afeared. “Well, what could she do with a lot of miserable niggers, if she didn’t give them to us? A lot of good-for-nothing rebels they are, too,” said Peter.

“What is a rebel?” asked the stranger.