Bulstrode rose and walked about the room excitedly. Mrs. Blair watched him breathlessly. Blair had stopped his play with Hilary, and was listening with all his ears. When the string of Bulstrode’s tongue was unloosed he usually stopped at nothing. But now he was restrained. He had gone as far as he dared, but he looked hard at Mrs. Blair, and said: “You are Skelton’s nearest relative--ain’t you, madam?” “Yes,” answered Mrs. Blair, in a low voice. “I am his first cousin--and I am the last of my family.” “Lord, Lord, Lord!” shouted Bulstrode again, then relapsed into silence, and suddenly burst into his great laugh. Mrs. Blair felt uncomfortable and perplexed, and Blair got up and left the room. Bulstrode said no more of Skelton, and went back to his grievances about the racing, and then took up the Latin grammar again. Mrs. Blair, who had a very just estimate of her own knowledge of Latin, had an inordinately high one of Blair’s acquirements in that respect. “You know, Mr. Bulstrode,” she said, “Mr. Blair is really a very fine scholar. He was quite a distinguished Latinist when he was at William and Mary.” Bulstrode sniffed openly at Blair’s scholarship and William and Mary. “Then he ought to teach your boy, ma’am. I swear, Mrs. Blair, it addles my brain sometimes when I see the beauty and splendour of the passion you women bestow on your husbands and children.” Mrs. Blair’s face flushed a little, and a beautiful angry light burned in her eyes, as it always did at the slightest implication that Blair was not perfect. “Luckily for me,” she said, with a little arrogant air, “my husband and children are worthy of it. All that I know of unworthy husbands and children is about other women’s husbands and children.” “Yes, yes,” eagerly assented Bulstrode, and then went off again on the subject of his grievances about Miles Lightfoot and the races, and even that Lewis Pryor was getting too fond of the stables and stayed there too much, and he meant to speak to Skelton about it. Bulstrode left Mr. and Mrs. Blair under the impression that there was some queer complication connected with the late Mrs. Skelton’s money, with which they were mixed up, and it gave rise naturally to much speculation on their part. They talked it over a great deal, but they had nothing positive to go upon. Elizabeth, womanlike, tried to dismiss it from her mind, and the more so when she saw that Blair was deeply pondering it. At all events, Skelton would keep his own until his death, for neither of them believed he would marry again; and as he was not quite forty--some years younger than Blair himself--it was idle to think too much about what was so far in the future. Bulstrode was as good as his word about Lewis Pryor, and the very next day made his complaint about Lewis to Skelton. “Send him to me,” said Skelton briefly.