Lady Kew, I'm
not safe from that man and that woman," cries poor Barnes, in an agony of
terror.
"Fighting is Jack Belsize's business, Barnes Newcome; banking is yours,
luckily," said the dowager. "As old Lord Highgate was to die and his
eldest son, too, it is a pity certainly they had not died a year or two
earlier, and left poor Clara and Charles to come together. You should
have married some woman in the serious way; my daughter Walham could have
found you one. Frank, I am told, and his wife go on very sweetly
together; her mother-in-law governs the whole family. They have turned
the theatre back into a chapel again: they have six little ploughboys
dressed in surplices to sing the service; and Frank and the Vicar of
Kewbury play at cricket with them on holidays. Stay, why should not Clara
go to Kewbury?"
"She and her sister have quarrelled about this very affair with Lord
Highgate. Some time ago it appears they had words about it and when I
told Kew that bygones had best be bygones, that Highgate was very sweet
upon Ethel now, and that I did not choose to lose such a good account as
his, Kew was very insolent to me; his conduct was blackguardly, ma'am,
quite blackguardly, and you may be sure but for our relationship I would
have called him to----"
Here the talk between Barnes and his ancestress was interrupted by the
appearance of Miss Ethel Newcome, taper in hand, who descended from the
upper regions enveloped in a shawl.
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