as they were on the very point of starting for St. Barnabas: and
his opinion of the man was in no way enhanced by Frida's enthusiasm.
"As far as I'm concerned," he said, with his slow Scotch drawl,
inherited from his father (for though London-born and bred, he was
still in all essentials a pure Caledonian)--"As far as I'm
concerned, I haven't the slightest doubt but the man's a swindler.
I wonder at you, Frida, that you should leave him alone in the
house just now, with all that silver. I stepped round before I
left, and warned Martha privately not to move from the hall till
the fellow was gone, and to call up cook and James if he tried to
get out of the house with any of our property. But you never
seemed to suspect him. And to supply him with a bag, too, to
carry it all off in! Well, women are reckless! Hullo, there,
policeman;--stop, Price, one moment;--I wish you'd keep an eye on
my house this morning. There's a man in there I don't half like
the look of. When he drives away in a cab that my boy's going to
call for him, just see where he stops, and take care he hasn't got
anything my servants don't know about."

In the drawing-room, meanwhile, Bertram Ingledew was reflecting, as
he waited for the church people to clear away, how interesting
these English clothes-taboos and day-taboos promised to prove,
beside some similar customs he had met with or read of in his
investigations elsewhere. He remembered how on a certain morning of
the year the High Priest of the Zapotecs was obliged to get drunk,
an act which on any other day in the calendar would have been
regarded by all as a terrible sin in him. He reflected how in
Guinea and Tonquin, at a particular period once a twelvemonth,
nothing is considered wrong, and everything lawful, so that the
worst crimes and misdemeanours go unnoticed and unpunished. He