Skelton’s impulse was to pick up a chair and brain Bulstrode on the spot, but instead, he only said coldly: “You have been drinking, Bulstrode. You can’t let a decanter pass you.” “Yes, I’ve been drinking,” cried Bulstrode, with a frank laugh; “but you know yourself I’m a much better and braver man drunk than sober. When I’m sober I’m cowed by that devilish cool gentlemanliness of yours; but when I’ve had a bottle of port I’m as good a man as you, Skelton; and I see that you will never be happy until you have made Blair the wretchedest man alive. Come, now. You’ve got lashings of money. Blair is as poor as a church mouse. You have got everything on earth.” Skelton had risen during this, and could scarcely keep his hands off Bulstrode where he sat; but it was grotesque enough that he could not make Bulstrode hold his tongue. He could only say between his teeth: “Drunken dog!” Bulstrode rose too at that, with a kind of dogged courage. “I am a drunken dog, I am!” he said; “but I am Wat Bulstrode, too; don’t forget that. Don’t forget that I know a great deal more out of books than you do. Don’t forget that you could hardly get another man who could fill my place. Don’t forget that I am more to you than all those thousands of volumes you’ve got in yonder. Don’t forget that I am Lewis Pryor’s guardian until he is one and twenty. You may regret that fact, but you can’t alter it. And, more than all--let me tell you--_I_ know all the very curious provisions of your wife’s will. You never condescended to ask me to keep silence, and I made you no promise. Drunken dog, indeed! And I could tell that which would turn this county bottom upwards! Suppose I were to tell Mrs. Blair to make herself easy; that those fools of lawyers made it so that one day, whether you die or marry, everything that was your wife’s goes to your heirs--and she is your heir, because you’ve got no other relations. And Lewis Pryor--ah, Skelton, how many clever men overreach themselves! I know, too, that so bunglingly did these legal fools their work, that if you could prove that you had a son at the time of your wife’s death, he would get the fortune. That fate was so desperately at work against common sense, that they forgot to put in whether he should be entitled to your name or not. But so cleverly have you made it appear that Lewis Pryor is the son of that lanky, sandy-haired tutor, that maybe you would have a hard time unravelling your own web. And so you think me a drunken dog, hey? All this I tell you is as clear as a bell in my--drunken mind, as you would call it.”