The two younger men rose.

“Mr. Wingfold you know, my lady!” said her husband.

“I have not had the pleasure,” answered lady Ann, with a slight motion of her head, like the hard bud at the top of a long stalk.

“Ah, I thought you did! The Reverend Mr. Wingfold, lady Ann! My wife, Mr. Wingfold! The other gentleman, lady Ann—”

He paused. Lady Ann turned her eyes slowly on Richard. Wingfold saw a slight, barely perceptible start, and settling of the jaws.

“The other gentleman,” resumed the baronet, “you do not know, but you will soon be the best of friends.”

“I beg your pardon, sir Wilton, I do know him! I hope,” she went on, turning to Richard, “you will keep steadily to your work. The sooner the books are finished the better!”

Richard smiled, but what he was on the point of saying, his father prevented.

“You mistake, my lady!” said the baronet. “The gentleman is my son, and will one day be sir Richard.”

“Oh!” returned her ladyship, without a shadow of change in her impassivity. Wingfold, however, detected the slightest movement of squint in the eye nearest him. She held out her hand.

“This is an unexpected—”

For once in her life her lips were truer than her heart—they did not say pleasure.

Richard took her hand respectfully, sad for the woman whose winter had no fuel, and who looked as if she would be sad to all eternity. Lady Ann stared him in the eye.

“My favourite prayer book has come to pieces at last,” she said. “Perhaps you would bind it for me?”

“I would be delighted to,” answered Richard.

“Thank you,” she said, bowed to Wingfold, and left the room.

Sir Wilton sat like an offended turkey cock, staring after her. By Jove! he seemed to say to himself.

“There! that’s over!” he cried, coming to himself. “Ring the bell, Richard, and let’s have lunch.—Richard, no gentleman could have behaved better! I am proud of you! It’s blood that does it!” he murmured to himself.

As if he had himself compounded both his own blood and his son’s in the stillroom of creation, he took all the credit of Richard’s savoir faire, as he counted it. He did not know that the same thing made Wingfold happy and Richard a gentleman. Richard had a higher breeding than was known to sir Wilton. At the court of courts, whence the manners of some other courts would be swept as dust from the floors, the baronet would hardly gain admittance!

Lady Ann went up the stairs slowly and perpendicularly, a dull pain at her heart. The cause was not so much that her son was the second son, as that the son of a blacksmith’s daughter was—she took care to say at first sight—a finer gentleman than her Arthur. Rank and position, she vaguely reflected, must not look for justice from the jealous heavens! They always sided with the poor! Just look at the Psalms—the rich and noble were dealt with so hard!