Blair was as good as his word, and sent immediately to England for a copy of Mrs. Skelton’s will. But in those days it was a matter of three months or more to get a thing of that kind attended to, and meanwhile affairs with him improved greatly. Old Tom Shapleigh, urged thereto by Sylvia, and also by Mrs. Shapleigh, who declared she never could tolerate a new neighbour at Newington, went quietly to work and bought up all of the most pressing claims against Blair. He knew that he could get as good interest on his money invested in Newington, under Blair’s admirable management, as anywhere else; and, besides, he was fond of the Blairs, and anxious to do them a good turn for the very bad one of selling Alabaster to Blair. So Blair suddenly found himself very much better placed than he expected, and with an excellent chance, if he lived ten years, of paying off his debts. He also had a strange sense of relief when his race horses were sold, at the feeling that it was now out of his power to be a turfite any longer. It had always been a nightmare as well as a vampire to him, and fortunately it was one of those passions which have a body to them, and can therefore be destroyed, at least temporarily. His horses brought uncommonly good prices, which enabled him to pay some of the small debts that harassed him most. He began to think, with a sort of savage satisfaction, that what Skelton designed for his destruction might in the end be his salvation. Hilary, too, began to improve rapidly, and was in six weeks’ time perfectly recovered. Mrs. Blair was amazed at the turn affairs took; but there was yet an unspoken, still antagonism between Blair and herself in regard to his course about the Skelton money. They had been so happy together for so many years that the mere habit of love was strong. The children saw no shadow between their father and mother, but nevertheless it was there, and it pursued them; it sat down by them, and walked with them, and never left them. Elizabeth, seeing how happy they might have been without this, conceived a tender, womanish superstition against the money that might be theirs. She had a faint, quivering doubt that much money might be Blair’s destruction; and, anyhow, the mere hint of it had brought silent dissension between them, when nothing else ever had. Mrs. Blair, in the depths of her soul, heartily wished Bulstrode had never told her what he did, or that she had never told Blair. She had been able to hold up her head proudly before Richard Skelton in all the rivalry between him and her husband; but now, this unseemly looking after what might never be theirs and was never intended to be theirs, this hankering after dead men’s shoes, made her ashamed.