Lord Lamerton had shown the young tutor extraordinary kindness, for he was a man with a soft heart, and he really wished to make the young fellow happy. He would have liked Giles to have opened out to him and not to have maintained a formal distance, but he was unable to do more than invite confidence, and he attributed the stiffness of the tutor to his shyness. Of late, his lordship had begun to think that perhaps Jingles was somewhat morbid, but this he attributed to his constitutional delicacy. Consumptive people are fantastical, was his hasty generalization. In the heart of Giles Inglett Saltren a very mixed feeling existed as he walked back to the park. He was gratified to think that he had noble blood in his veins, but he was incensed at the thought of the treachery to which his mother had fallen a victim, and which robbed him of his birth-rights. Had that function in the drawing-room, described by his mother, been celebrated legally, he and not the snivelling little Giles would be heir to Orleigh, to fifty thousand a year, and a coronet, and a seat in the House of Lords. What use would Giles the Little make of his privileges? Would he not lead the same prosaic life as his father, planting pines, digging fish-ponds, keeping a pack of hounds, doing the active work of a county magnate and magistrate—whereas he—Giles Inglett Saltren, no longer Saltren, but Baron Lamerton of Orleigh, might become, with the advantages of his birth, wealth, and abilities combined, the greatest statesman and reformer England had known. He felt that his head was bursting with ideas, his blood on fire to give them utterance, and his hands tingling to carry his projects into effect. Without some adventitious help, such as position and wealth could give, he could not take the place he knew by inner illumination should be his. “I was sure of it,” said Jingles, “that is to say I imagined that I could not be the son of a common mining captain. There was something superior to that sort of stuff in me. But now this infamous act of treachery stands between me and acknowledgment by the world, between me and such success as, perhaps no man in England, except perhaps Mr. Gladstone, has attained to. All I want is a lift on the ladder—after that first step I will mount the rest of the way myself.” He walked on fast. His blood seethed in his heart. He was angry with Lord Lamerton for having betrayed his mother’s trust, and with his mother for allowing herself to be deceived.