He learnt how to treat the servants. The footmen had misbehaved when he addressed them as "my boy" and "old toucher" from his place at table. He consulted Claude, and dropped these familiarities as well as the painfully respectful tone which he had at first employed towards old Stebbings, the butler. Stebbings had been very many years in the family. The deference inspired by his venerable presence was natural enough in the new Duke of St. Osmund's; but it shocked and distressed Stebbings's feudal soul. He complained to Claude, and he had not to complain twice. For Jack discovered a special and a touching eagerness to master the rudiments of etiquette; though in other respects (which certainly mattered less) he was still incorrigible. His social "crammer" could no more cure him of his hatred of a collar than of his liking for his cats. The latter were always with him; the former, unhappily, was not. In these things the Duke was hopelessly unregenerate; he was a stockman still at heart, and a stockman he threatened to remain. The soft summer nights were nothing to the nights in the bush; the fleecy English sky was not blue at all after the skies of Riverina; and the Duke's ideal of a man was "my old boss." Claude heard of "my old boss" until he was sick of the words, which constituted a gratuitous reminder of a position most men would have been glad to forget. Yet there was much to be thankful for. There were no more scenes such as the Duke's set-to in his own stable-yard with one of his own tenants. At least nothing of the sort happened again until Jack's next collision with Matthew Hunt. And that was not yet. Matthew was from home when the Duke, making a round of the estate, with his agent, visited the Lower Farm in its turn. Old Hunt, Matthew's besotted father, received them in the kitchen with a bloodshot stare and little else, for drink had long dimmed his forces. Not so the old man's daughter-in-law, Matthew's wife, who showed the visitors all over the farm in a noiseless manner that made Jack feel uneasy, because he never knew when she was or was not at his elbow. Besides, he could not forget the thrashing he had given her husband, nor yet suppose that she had forgotten it either. The woman was of a gross type strangely accentuated by her feline quietude. She had a continual smile, and sly eyes that dropped when they encountered those of the Duke, whom they followed sedulously at all other moments. Jack seemed to know it, too; at all events he was not sorry to turn his back upon the Lower Farm. "A rum lot, the Hunts!" he said at lunch. "They're about the only folks here that I haven't cottoned to on the spot. I shall get on fine with all the others. But I can't suffer those Hunts!"