“But, John, what makes you think he is an adventurer? I am quite sure he is one of the Essex Everards, who are as good a family and as well thought of--” “Did he tell you he was one of the Essex Everards?” Mrs. Lennox put on a very serious air of trying to remember. She bit her lips, she contracted her forehead, she put up her hand to her head. “I am sure,” she said, “I cannot recollect whether he ever _said_ it, but I have always understood. Why, what other Everards could he belong to?” she added, in the most candid tone. “That is just the question,” said John Trevanion; “the same sort of Everards perhaps as my friend’s Riverses, or most likely not half so good. Indeed, I’m not at all sure that your friend has any right even to the name he claims. I both saw and heard of him before we left Highcourt. By Jove!” He was not a man to swear, even in this easy way, but he jumped up from the seat upon which he had thrown himself and grew so red that Aunt Sophy immediately thought of the suppressed gout in the family, and felt that it must suddenly have gone to his head. “Oh, John, my dear! what is it?” she cried. He paced about the room back and forward in high excitement, repeating to himself that exclamation. “Oh, nothing, nothing! I can’t quite tell what it is,” he said. “A twinge in your foot,” cried Mrs. Lennox. “Oh, John, though it is late, very late, in the season, and you could not perhaps follow out the cure altogether, you might at least take some of the baths as they are ordered for Johnny. It might prevent an illness hereafter. It might, if you took it in time--” “What is a ‘cure’?” said John. Mrs. Lennox pronounced the word, as indeed it is intended that the reader should pronounce it in this history, in the French way; but this in her honest mouth, used to good, downright English pronunciation, sounded like _koor_, and the brother did not know what it was. He laughed so long and so loudly at the idea of preventing an illness by the cure, as he called it with English brutality, and at the notion of Johnny’s baths, that Mrs. Lennox was quite disconcerted and could not find a word to say.