He touched his hat.

“How’s the mare to-day, Akers?” asked Sir Edmund.

“Nicely, nicely; it’s a splendid mash that, Sir Edmund.  Old Hartley gave me the recipe for that.  He was stud-groom here longer than I have been, in the old lord’s day.  He had hoped to have had his son to follow him, but the lad got wild, and it couldn’t be.”

The old man sighed, and changed the conversation.  “Will you come round again, sir?”

“Yes,” said Edmund; “I don’t mind if I do.  But you’ve got a son of your own about the stable, haven’t you?” he asked, as they turned towards the other side of the yard.

“I had two, Sir Edmund,” was the brief and melancholy answer.  “Jimmy’s here, but the lad I thought most on, he went and enlisted in the war, and he couldn’t settle down again after that.  Jimmy, he’ll never rise to my place—­it would not be fair, and I wouldn’t let his lordship give it a thought—­but the other one might have done it.”

Sir Edmund felt some sympathy for the stay-at-home, whom he knew.  “He seems a cheerful, steady fellow.”

“He’s steady enough, and he’s cheerful enough,” said his father, in a tone of great contempt; “but the other lad had talent—­he had talent.”

Both men had paused in the interest of their talk.

“My eldest son, Thomas, of whom I’m speaking, went to the war in the same ship as General Sir David Bright, and there’s a thing I’d like to tell you about that, Sir Edmund.  It never came into my head how curious a thing it was till yesterday—­last night, I may say.  Lady Rose Bright’s lady’s-maid come in with Lady Groombridge’s lady’s-maid to see my wife, and you’ll excuse me if I do repeat some woman’s gossip when you see why I do it.  Well, the long and short of it was that it seems Lady Rose Bright has been left rather close as to fortune for a lady in her position, and the money’s all gone off elsewhere.  Then the maid said, Sir Edmund—­whether truly or not I don’t know, naturally—­that there had been hopes that another will might be sent home from South Africa, but that nothing came of it.  I felt, so to speak, puzzled while I was listening, and afterwards my wife says to me while we were alone, she says, ’Wasn’t it our Thomas when he was on board ship wrote that he had put his name to a paper for Sir David Bright?’—­witnessing, you’ll understand she meant by that, sir—­’and what’s become of that paper I should like to know,’ says she.  So she up and went to her room and took out all Thomas’s letters, and sure enough it was true.”

Akers paused, and then very slowly extracted a fat pocket-book from his tight-fitting coat, and pulled out a letter beautifully written on thin paper.  He held it with evident respect, and then, after a preparatory cough, he began to read: 

“’I was sent for to-day, and taken up with another of our regiment to the state cabins by Sir David Bright’s servant, and asked to put my name to a paper as witness to Sir David Bright’s signature, and so I did.’”