“And yet, confound her—­confound her!” he thought, as he walked into the loose box to look the mare over and pat her sleekness.

The relations which established themselves between Palstrey and The Kennel Farm were marked by two characteristic features.  One of these was that Lord Walderhurst did not develop any warmer interest in the Osborns, and that Lady Walderhurst did.  Having acceded to Emily’s wishes, and really behaved generously in the matter of providing for his heir presumptive and his wife, Lord Walderhurst felt impelled to no further demonstration of feeling.

“I don’t like him any better than I did,” he remarked to Emily.  “And I cannot say that Mrs. Osborn attracts me.  Of course there is a reason why a kind-hearted woman like yourself should be specially good to her just now.  Do anything you wish for them while they are in the neighbourhood.  But as for me, the fact that a man is one’s heir presumptive is not enough in itself alone to endear him to one, rather the contrary.”

Between these two it is to be confessed there existed that rancour which is not weakened by the fact that it remains unexpressed and lurks in the deeps of the inward being.  Walderhurst would not have been capable of explaining to himself that the thing he chiefly disliked in this robust, warm-blooded young man was that when he met him striding about with his gun over his shoulder and a keeper behind him, the almost unconscious realisation of the unpleasant truth that he was striding over what might prove to be his own acres, and shooting birds which in the future he would himself possess the right to preserve, to invite other people to shoot, to keep less favoured persons from shooting, as lord of the Manor.  This was a truth sufficiently irritating to accentuate all his faults of character and breeding.

Emily, whose understanding of his nature developed with every day of her life, grew into a comprehension of this by degrees.  Perhaps her greatest leap forward was taken on the day when, as he was driving her in the cart which had picked her up on the moor, they saw Osborn tramping through a cover with his gun.  He did not see them, and a shade of irritation swept Walderhurst’s face.

“He seems to feel very much at home,” he commented.

Then he was silent for a space during which he did not look pleased.

“If he were my son,” he said, “it would be a different matter.  If Audrey’s child had lived—­”

He stopped and gave the tall mare a light cut with his whip.  He was evidently annoyed with himself for having spoken.

A hot wave of colour submerged Emily.  She felt it rush over her whole body.  She turned her face away, hoping Walderhurst would not observe her.  This was the first time she had heard him utter his dead wife’s name.  She had never heard anyone speak it.  Audrey had evidently not been a much-beloved or regretted person.  But she had had a son.