‘My sister—Eleanor—she is at school. I see her sometimes,’ said Otho carelessly. ‘She told me, the last time I called upon her, that she was going to college, and meant to carry off honours, if I didn’t.’ He smiled again, and added, ‘We part here, I think. Good day. I am glad to have renewed our acquaintance.’ They separated, going their several ways, and the Langstroths rode on in silence for a little time. ‘Well,’ said Michael presently, ‘it cannot be said that he has turned out an interesting character.’ ‘Opinions differ,’ was Gilbert’s reply, in a tone which, for him, might be called curt. ‘I think he is interesting.’ ‘Do you? I should have said you were the last—— By the way, Gilbert, you might have knocked me over with your little finger at breakfast this morning when I heard you talking about Dusky Beauty and her pedigree. I didn’t know you knew one race-horse from another.’ ‘Well, I am quite certain you don’t,’ said Gilbert, with less than his usual suavity; ‘and it is my principle not to try and entertain people by conversation about things in which they don’t take the slightest interest. Otho Askam, there, does know one race-horse from another.’ ‘What, is he horsey, then? Is that his little failing?’ ‘He is horsey—I don’t know how much, yet,’ said Gilbert, with his gentle gravity. ‘That’s what I have got to find out, and it is what I mean to find out. I shall give him the pleasure of my company on an early day. You can please yourself when you go. Here we are.’ After Otho Askam’s arrival, which was, as it were, made public by this appearance amongst the gentlemen of his county, he and his sayings and doings furnished endless topics for the gossips of the neighbourhood. It was, of course, only by degrees that public opinion about him took a definite shape, but the process of collecting data on which to form one’s opinion of a person’s character is to many persons an even more delightful employment, and more enjoyable, than the frequent utterance of that opinion when found; though this, of course, must possess the higher quality of benefiting and instructing those who hear it. The Bradstane neighbours—people in districts like that are neighbours if they do not live more than ten miles apart—abandoned themselves at first with joy and satisfaction, and a keenly pleasurable sense of having found a new interest, to this first branch of the business—the collecting of data. Women asked their men—and declined to be put off with mere vague, general statements in reply—what they thought of Otho Askam; and men said things to each other about him, and laughed, or nodded, or shrugged, as the case might be.