friend of Hugh's family."

Mr. Barron was silent.

"Is he such a scamp?" said Mrs. Flaxman, raising her fine eyes, with a
laugh in them. "You make me quite anxious to see him!"

Mr. Barron echoed the laugh, stiffly.

"I doubt whether your husband will wish to bring him here. He gathers
some strange company at the Abbey. He is there now for the fishing."

Manvers inquired who this gentleman might be; and Mrs. Flaxman gave him a
lightly touched account. A young man of wealth and family, it seemed, but
spoilt from his earliest days, and left fatherless at nineteen, with only
an adoring but quite ineffectual mother to take account of. Some
notorious love affairs at home and abroad; a wild practical joke or two,
played on prominent people, and largely advertised in the newspapers; an
audacious novel, and a censored play--he had achieved all these things by
the age of thirty, and was now almost penniless, and still unmarried.

"Hugh says that the Abbey is falling into ruin--and that the young man
has about a hundred a year left out of his fortune. On this he keeps
apparently an army of servants and a couple of hunters! The strange
thing is--Hugh discovered it when he went to call on the Rector the other
day--that this preposterous young man is a first cousin of Mr. Meynell's.
His mother, Lady Meryon, and the Rector's mother were sisters. The
Rector, however, seems to have dropped him long ago."

Mr. Barron still sat silent.