Lord Biddenden exchanged a speaking look with his brother; but Hugh merely remarked that it was very true, and that in such a contemptuous voice that Biddenden was goaded into saying: “Well, at all events, it is as much to the purpose that I have come as that Dolphinton has! Folly!”

“I’m an Earl,” said Lord Dolphinton, suddenly reentering the conversation. “You ain’t an Earl. Hugh ain’t an Earl. Freddy ain’t—”

“No, you are the only Earl amongst us,” interposed Hugh soothingly.

“George is only a Baron,” said Dolphinton.

Lord Biddenden cast him a glance of dislike, and said something under his breath about impoverished Irish peers. He had less patience with Dolphinton than any of the cousins, and the remark, moreover, had slightly wounded his sensibilities. He was a man of more pride than genius; liked to think himself the head of a family of great consequence; and was ambitious to improve his condition. However poorly he might think of Irish titles, he could never see Dolphinton without suffering a pang. A juster providence, he felt, must have reversed their positions. Not that he wished to exchange more with Dolphinton than his title: certainly not his snug inheritance for Dolphinton’s Irish acres, mortgaged to the hilt, as he had good reason to suppose they were. Dolphinton was an only child, too, and that would not have suited his cousin. Lord Biddenden’s instincts were patriarchal. He liked to see his brothers and sisters under his roof, and to feel that they depended upon him for guidance; and he was almost as anxious for their advancement as his own. It had been a source of considerable chagrin to him that circumstances had made it impossible for him to bestow his first living upon Hugh. He, and not Matthew Penicuik, should have been Hugh’s benefactor, and he could never quite forgive the valetudinarian who was nursing Hugh’s Rectory for having grossly outlived expectation.