“Look at him well,” said Skelton, with a new, strange pride in his voice. “See how manly, how well formed he is--slight, but a powerful fellow--worth two of that hulking Blair boy. See his forehead; did you ever see a fool with a forehead like that? and the cut of the mouth and chin! Think you, Bulstrode, that with this boy I will ever let the Blairs get any of that money that you foolishly told them they would? Could not any father be proud of such a boy? I tell you there are times when I yearn over him womanishly--when I cannot trust myself near him for fear I will clasp him in my arms. I envy Blair but one thing, and that is, that he can show the fondness for his son that I feel for mine but cannot show. Did you think, did you dream for a moment, that I would not see this boy righted?” He said “this boy” with an accent of such devoted pride that Bulstrode could only gaze astounded, well as he knew Skelton’s secret devotion to the boy. He had never in all his life seen Skelton so moved by anything. Skelton bent down and kissed Lewis on the forehead. If the portrait of Skelton’s great-grandfather that hung over the mantelpiece had stepped down from its frame and kissed the boy, Bulstrode could scarcely have been more surprised. No mother over her first-born could have shown more fondness than Skelton. “Go, now,” presently cried Skelton. His anger had quite vanished. It seemed as if in that one burst of paternal feeling all pride and anger had melted away. He could defy the Blairs now. Bulstrode might have retaliated on him what he had said to Mrs. Blair about it. He might have said: “How can you prove it? So anxious you were to give this child a respectable parentage, that you cannot now undo, if you will, your own work. And who could not see an object in it that would make people believe you seized upon this boy merely as an instrument against the Blairs?” But he said not a word. He got up and went out, and, as he passed, he laid his hand upon the boy’s head. “I, too, have loved him well,” he said. “Yes,” said Skelton, “and that may help you yet. No man that loves that boy can my anger hold against.” And so poor Lewis, who often felt and said sadly that he had no one to love him, was fondled adoringly by the last person in the world that he would have expected.