There followed a sharp exclamation, and on the instant Lady Skene had snatched my brother from my hands. She had come upon us unobserved. Her face was alight with an expression I had never seen there before. The statue had blazed into momentary life. She was a woman, and a cruel woman confessed for the first time in my knowledge of her. “Not yours,” she said, deep and resentful. “He has no part or concern with you. Don’t dare to touch him or contaminate him again!” I stood facing her without a word. In that moment my utter hate and vindictiveness were born. As she had dealt with me, so would I deal with her. The first card was in my hand. I turned quietly and left them. CHAPTER VI. MY FIRST ENLIGHTENMENT Mr Pugsley sat in the study of his vicarage at Market Grazing. He was composing a sermon--no doubt on the eternal lines of pre-election and the divine partiality. He never gathered how his principles made a comfortable sinecure of his living; but a sinecure it was--a sort of well-furnished limbo, his complete enjoyment of which was only marred by a chronic dyspepsia. He looked up, as I entered, and greeted me with a frown. “Gaskett!” he exclaimed. “I was somehow thinking of you, and here you are.” I acknowledged the compliment promptly. “Yes, I’m the devil, sir,” I said; “and for once in your life you’ve got to answer to me.” He started, and turned a little yellower. “This is a strange beginning,” he wondered. “For what, boy, do you hold me answerable to you?” “For concealment, sir, amongst other things. Mr Pugsley, will you please to tell me if I am my mother’s son?” He shifted a paper or two on his desk. I could see he was staggered, and thrown for the moment off his balance. I had no object in hurrying him. After all, if he had the elective licence, he had not the instinct to tell a lie. “Answer at your leisure, sir,” I said. My tone, I quite felt it, took command. This narrow mind had no longer any terrors for me. I had come, in a day, of a very stern and sorrowful intellectual age. He turned to me presently, almost propitiatory. “What a very curious question, Gaskett! Lady Skene has surely always done her duty by you?” “That wasn’t what I asked. I asked if I were her son.” “How can you doubt it?” “I can’t, sir, to my grief.” “To your grief? O, this is sad!” He fidgeted with the lamp--it was evening--and tried to meet my eyes again, but avoided them. “It is very sad,” I said. “But why should you deplore it, when from the first you have fostered and encouraged in her that spirit which is responsible for all the sadness?” “_I_, Gaskett?” “Have you not? Have you not always, sir, accounted me a child of sin?” “Which you are, in the fullest sense.” The admission seemed to slip out of him, in his agitation, unintentionally. Having made it, he stooped, and hurriedly took a nerve pill. He always carried a box of them about with him.