a week were to pay a keeper. Then I asked a clergyman who has a living
near this common what he thought would be the end of it. 'Well,' he
said, 'the first day they'd shoot every animal on the place; the second
day they'd shoot each other. Universal carnage--I should say that would
be about the end of it.' These were trifles, of course--details."

Hallin shook his head serenely.

"I still maintain," he said, "that a little practical ingenuity might
have found a way."

"And I will support you," said Wharton, laying down the paper-knife and
bending over to Hallin, "with good reason. For three years and a few
months just such an idea as you describe has been carried out on my own
estate, and it has not worked badly at all."

"There!" cried Marcella. "There! I knew something could be done, if
there was a will. I have always felt it."

She half turned to Aldous, then bent forward instead as though listening
eagerly for what more Wharton might say, her face all alive, and
eloquent.

"Of course, there was nothing to shoot!" exclaimed Frank Leven.

"On the contrary," said Wharton, smiling, "we are in the middle of a
famous partridge country."

"How your neighbours must dote on you!" cried the boy. But Wharton took
no notice.

"And my father preserved strictly," he went on. "It is quite a simple
story. When I inherited, three years ago, I thought the whole thing
detestable, and determined I wouldn't be responsible for keeping it up.
So I called the estate together--farmers and labourers--and we worked
out a plan. There are keepers, but they are the estate servants, not
mine. Everybody has his turn according to the rules--I and my friends
along with the rest. Not everybody can shoot every year, but everybody
gets his chance, and, moreover, a certain percentage of all the game
killed is public property, and is distributed every year according to a
regular order."

"Who pays the keepers?" interrupted Leven.

"I do," said Wharton, smiling again. "Mayn't I--for the present--do what
I will with mine own? I return in their wages some of my ill-gotten
gains as a landowner. It is all makeshift, of course."

"I understand!" exclaimed Marcella, nodding to him--"you could not be a
Venturist and keep up game-preserving?"

Wharton met her bright eye with a half deprecating, reserved air.

"You are right, of course," he said drily. "For a Socialist to be
letting his keepers run in a man earning twelve shillings a week for
k