On one such day they went out, as it chanced, into the meadows that stretch up the hill behind Brackenhurst. Frida remembered it well afterwards. It was the day when an annual saturnalia of vulgar vice usurps and pollutes the open downs at Epsom. Bertram did not care to see it, he said--the rabble of a great town turned loose to desecrate the open face of nature--even regarded as a matter of popular custom; he had looked on at much the same orgies before in New Guinea and on the Zambesi, and they only depressed him: so he stopped at Brackenhurst, and went for a walk instead in the fresh summer meadows. Robert Monteith, for his part, had gone to the Derby--so they call that orgy--and Philip had meant to accompany him in the dogcart, but remained behind at the last moment to take care of Frida; for Frida, being a lady at heart, always shrank from the pollution of vulgar assemblies. As they walked together across the lush green fields, thick with campion and yellow-rattle, they came to a dense copse with a rustic gate, above which a threatening notice-board frowned them straight in the face, bearing the usual selfish and anti-social inscription, “Trespassers will be prosecuted.” “Let's go in here and pick orchids,” Bertram suggested, leaning over the gate. “Just see how pretty they are! The scented white butterfly! It loves moist bogland. Now, Mrs. Monteith, wouldn't a few long sprays of that lovely thing look charming on your dinner-table?” “But it's preserved,” Philip interposed with an awestruck face. “You can't go in there: it's Sir Lionel Longden's, and he's awfully particular.” “Can't go in there? Oh, nonsense,” Bertram answered, with a merry laugh, vaulting the gate like a practised athlete. “Mrs. Monteith can get over easily enough, I'm sure. She's as light as a fawn. May I help you over?” And he held one hand out. “But it's private,” Philip went on, in a somewhat horrified voice; “and the pheasants are sitting.” “Private? How can it be? There's nothing sown here. It's all wild wood; we can't do any damage. If it was growing crops, of course, one would walk through it not at all, or at least very carefully. But this is pure woodland. Are the pheasants tabooed, then? or why mayn't we go near them?” “They're not tabooed, but they're preserved,” Philip answered somewhat testily, making a delicate distinction without a difference, after the fashion dear to the official intellect. “This land belongs to Sir Lionel Longden, I tell you, and he chooses to lay it all down in pheasants. He bought it and paid for it, so he has a right, I suppose, to do as he likes with it.”