He came up the stairs; he knocked at the door with an expression of fixed resolution. One might have expected him to bang his fist on the table and to cry out: “There! that’s what I want, and that’s what I mean to have.” He did not quite do that, but he intended to do it when he called, and he would have done, I have no doubt, but for the cold, quiet air with which his cousin received him. “Mr. Campaigne,” he began, “or cousin, if you like----” “Mr. Campaigne, perhaps,” said Leonard the supercilious. “Well, Mr. Campaigne, then, I’ve come to have a few words of explanation--explanation, sir!” he repeated, with some fierceness. “By all means. Pray take a chair.” He took a chair, and was then seized by the doubt of which we have spoken. Perhaps the cause was the commanding position of his cousin, standing over him six foot three in height, and with a face like that of a Judge not personally interested in the case before him. “The point is this: I’ve got a bill against your family, and I want to know whether I am to present it to you or to my great-grandfather?” “A bill? Of what nature?” “A bill for maintenance. We have maintained my grandmother for fifty years. She has been kept partly by my grandfather, partly by my family, and partly by myself, and it’s time that your family should do their duty.” “That is a very remarkable claim.” “Putting it at £50 a year, which is cheap for the lavish way she’s been kept, that makes £2,500. At compound interest it mounts up to £18,000 and odd. I shall be contented to square the claim for £18,000.” “You propose to send in a bill--a bill for keeping your own grandmother?” “That is just what I am going to do.” “You must surely be aware that such a claim would not be entertained for a moment. No Court of Law would so much as look at it.” “I am aware of the fact. But this is not a claim of an ordinary kind; it is a claim that rests on equity--on equity, not on Law.” “What is the equitable side of the claim?” “Well, it’s this way: My grandfather, who failed for an enormous amount--which showed the position he occupied in the City--married my grandmother in the reasonable expectation that she would bring him a fortune. It is true that the old man was then not more than fifty or so, but he did not count so much on a will as on a settlement.” “I understand that the marriage was undertaken without consultation with my great-grandfather, or, under the circumstances, with his solicitors.” “That was, no doubt, the case; but when one marries into so wealthy a family, and when the head of it is not in a position to be consulted, the least that can be expected is a settlement--a settlement of some kind. My grandfather said that he expected nothing less than twenty thousand--twenty thousand. He dated his subsequent misfortunes to the failure of this expectation, because he got nothing. Perhaps, Mr. Campaigne, as you were not born then, you can hardly believe that he got nothing.”