“There would be the devil to pay if you were not here,” he said.  “You keep me in order, by Jove!  I can’t work up steam properly when you watch me.”

He himself knew that it was likely that some change would take place.  She would not stay at Stornham and she would not leave his wife and child alone with him again.  It would be like her to hold her tongue until she was ready with her infernal plans and could spring them on him.  Her letters to her father had probably prepared him for such action as such a man would be likely to take.  He could guess what it would be.  They were free and easy enough in America in their dealings with the marriage tie.  Their idea would doubtless be a divorce with custody of the child.  He wondered a little that they had remained quiet so long.  There had been American shrewdness in her coming boldly to Stornham to look over the ground herself and actually set the place in order.  It did not present itself to his mind that what she had done had been no part of a scheme, but the mere result of her temperament and training.  He told himself that it had been planned beforehand and carried out in hard-headed commercial American fashion as a matter of business.  The thing which most enraged him was the implied cool, practical realisation of the fact that he, as inheritor of an entailed estate, was but owner in charge, and not young enough to be regarded as an insurmountable obstacle to their plans.  He could not undo the greater part of what had been done, and they were calculating, he argued, that his would not be likely to be a long life, and if—­if anything happened—­Stornham would be Ughtred’s and the whole vulgar lot of them would come over and take possession and swagger about the place as if they had been born on it.  As to divorce or separation—­if they took that line, he would at least give them a good run for their money.  They would wish they had let sleeping dogs lie before the thing was over.  The right kind of lawyer could bully Rosalie into saying anything he chose on the witness-stand.  There was not much limit to the evidence a man could bring if he was experienced enough to be circumstantial, and knew whom he was dealing with.  The very fact that the little fool could be made to appear to have been so sly and sanctimonious would stir the gall of any jury of men.  His own condoning the matter for the sake of his sensitive boy, deformed by his mother’s unrestrained and violent hysteria before his birth, would go a long way.  Let them get their divorce, they would have paid for it, the whole lot of them, the beautiful Miss Vanderpoel and all.  Such a story as the newspapers would revel in would not be a recommendation to Englishmen of unsmirched reputation.  Then his exultation would suddenly drop as his mental excitement produced its effect of inevitable physical fatigue.  Even if he made them pay for getting their own way, what would happen to himself afterwards?  No morbid vanity of self-bolstering