He seemed to be puzzling over that. His silence made her break out with the hard words of her meaning. "Do you really not understand?" she broke out. "Do you go on like that just to irritate me? I believe you do." She gave her vexed laugh again. "I don't know what to believe. It's ridiculous--ridiculous you should be so different from everybody else. It means to me, this news, just this: that it makes you Lord Burdon. Can't you realise? Can't you share my feelings?" "Oh!" he said, as if at last he understood, and said no more. "How can I work up sympathy for people I have never seen?" she asked. He did not answer her--brushed his hair very slowly. "Nobody can say I should. Anybody in my place would feel as I feel." Still no reply, and that annoyed her beyond measure, forced her to say more than she meant. "What are they to me, these Burdons?" "They're my family, old girl," Mr. Letham ventured. She did not wish to say it but she said it; he goaded her. "You've never troubled to make them mine," she cried. Mr. Letham had done with his hair. He struggled a collar around his stout neck, examined what injury his finger nails had suffered in the process, and set to work on his tie. V For a few minutes Mrs. Letham frowned at the solid, untidy back turned towards her--the lumped shoulders, the heavy neck, the bulges of shirt sticking out between the braces. She gave a little laugh then--useless to be vexed. "You've never quarrelled with any one in your life, have you, Maurice?" she said; and with a touch in which kindliness struggled with impatience, she jerked down the bulging shirt, straightened a twisted brace, said, "Let me!" and by a deft twist or two gave Mr. Letham a neater tie than ever he had made himself. "There! That's better! Have you?" she asked. He told her smiling: "Not with you, anyway, Nellie." Little attentions like these were rare, and he liked them. In his weak and amiable way he patted the hand that rested for a moment on his shoulder, and he explained. "You're quite right, of course, old girl. Of course I realise what it means to you and I ought to have shared it with you at once. I'm sorry--sorry, Nellie. Just like me. And about never making them your family. I know you're right there. But you don't really mean that--don't mean I've done it intentionally. You know--I've often told you--we were miles apart, my branch and theirs; you do see that, don't you, old girl? A different branch--another crowd altogether. I don't suppose you've ever even heard of the relations who stand the same to you as I stand to the Burdons. All the time we've been married, long before that even, I've never had anything to do with 'em." He smiled affectionately at her. "That's all right, isn't it?"