Conyers smiled involuntarily as he looked at Bulstrode. There was nothing apostolic in that bulky figure and careless, dissipated face. Bulstrode went back to Deerchase, and complained next morning that he had been kept up late the night before labouring with Conyers to make him a Christian. Conyers, however, felt that he had been more helped by this boozy heathen than by all the theologians he had ever met with in his life. Meanwhile Skelton and his affairs continued to be of prodigious interest among the county people, who regarded him as their local prodigy. There was, of course, great speculation about his wife’s fortune, and much indignation expressed that it could not be bestowed upon some of the numerous young women who would have presided so admirably at Deerchase. The universal conviction was that Skelton would never marry, but, in the strange event that he did, conjecture ran wild as to what would become of the money. Some said it went to found a great charity hospital somewhere; others, that it returned to the late Mrs. Skelton’s family; others still, that, Mrs. Skelton having quarrelled with her relations, they would get none of it, but that it would go to Skelton’s next of kin, which, wonderful to say, were Elizabeth Blair and her children; but everybody was agreed in thinking that, before Skelton would see the Blairs benefitted by him, he would turn his back on Helen of Troy could she come back to earth. However, the solution seemed far enough off. It was perfectly well known that the late Mrs. Skelton had put an embargo of some sort upon her place being filled, and they would have to wait until Skelton, who was in the perfection of physical health, should be laid in his grave before the mystery would be solved. Skelton had come home in the early summer, and, although he had been formally called upon by all the gentry in the county, including Blair, as soon as he arrived, and the visits had been returned, but little had been seen of him. Even when the autumn meeting of the Jockey Club had come off, and when all the people from four counties had assembled and Skelton’s horses had carried everything before them, Skelton himself had scarcely appeared on the course at all. The truth was he was making a desperate effort to work. He shut himself up every day in the library, and actually got some little way upon his Introduction, but in a very short while a strange and irritating torpor seized upon him mentally. He had no distractions--he had all his books close by him, his notes tabulated; the whole thing was ready to his hand. The hand, though, refused to work; the mind refused to drive the hand. Skelton found he did as little in the scholastic retirement which he had adopted as in the whirl of cities.