“He does know that I am here,” cried the little gentleman, bursting with his grievance. It had come to that pitch that he could not keep silence any longer, and shut this all up in his own breast. “I wrote to let him know I had come. I should think he did know about his relations; and I--I can tell you, I’m a much nearer relation than any one here is aware.” Fairfax received this intimation quite calmly; he was not excited. Indeed it did not convey to him any kind of emotion. What did the matter? Uncle or distant cousin, it was of very little consequence. He said, placidly-- “The village looks very pretty from this window. Are you comfortable here?” “Comfortable!” echoed Gus. “Do you think I came all this way across the sea to shut myself up in a village public-house? I didn’t even know what a village public-house was. I knew that house up there, and had known it all my life. I’ve got a drawing of it I’ll show you, as like as anything ever was. Do you suppose I thought I would ever be sent away from there? I--oh, but you don’t know, you can’t suppose, how near a relation I am.” Fairfax thought the little man must be a monomaniac on this subject of his relationship to the Markhams. He thought it was but another instance of the wonderful way in which people worship family and descent. He himself having none of these things had marked often, with the keenness of a man who is beyond the temptation, the exaggerated importance which most people gave to them. Sir William Markham, it might be said, was a man whom it was worth while to be related to; but it did not matter what poor bit of a squire it was, Fairfax thought; a man who could boast himself the cousin of Hodge of Claypits was socially a better man than the best man who was related to nobody. What a strange thing this kind of test was! To belong to a famous historical family, or to be connected with people of eminent acquirements, he could understand that there might be a pride in that; but the poorest little common-place family that had vegetated at one place for a century or two! He did not make any answer to Mr. Gus, but smiled at him, and yet compassionated him--this poor little fellow who had come over here from the tropics with his head full of the glory of the Markhams, and now had nothing better to do than to sit in this little inn parlour and brag of his relationship to them; it was very pitiful, and yet it was ludicrous too. “I wonder,” he said suddenly, “whether they could put me up here? I want to go, and yet I don’t want to be away, if you can understand that. If anything were to happen, and Markham not here----”