It made Mrs. Letham very excited. Mrs. Letham, coming upon it as she idly turned over the newspaper at her breakfast, took a bang at the heart that for the moment made the print difficult to read. Recovering, she read it through, her pulses drumming, her breath catching, her hands shaking so that the paper rustled a little between them. She half rose from her seat, then read again. She read a third time and now pursued the lines to that subjoined paragraph written up from the "cuttings about Lord Burdon."
"Lord Burdon, the twelfth Baron, was attached to the staff of General Sir Wryford Sheringham, commanding the expeditionary force. He was a lieutenant in the 30th Hussars and left England in October last with General Sheringham when the latter went out to take command. Lord Burdon, who only attained his majority in April last, was unmarried. This is the first time since the creation of the Barony in 1660 that the title has not passed directly from holder to eldest son; and about Little Letham, Wilts, where is Burdon Old Manor, the family seat, the expressions "Safe as a Burdon till he's got his heir," and "Safe as a Burdon heir" have passed into the common parlance of the countryside. The successor is of a very remote branch—Mr. Maurice Redpath Letham, whose paternal great-grandfather was the eighth baron. It will be noticed as a most singular event that the first break in a direct succession extending over two hundred years should cause the new heir to be found in the line of no fewer than four generations ago of his house."
When Mrs. Letham presently arose, she arose suddenly as if she forced herself to move against spells that numbed her movements. She arose, the paper clutched between her hands, and for a space she stood with a dizzy air, as if her thoughts reeled in a giddy maze and perplexed her actions. A jostle of visions—half caught, bewildering glimpses of what this thing meant to her—spun through her brain, the mind shaping them quicker than the mental eye could distinguish them, as one half-stunned by a blow, dizzy between its violence and the onward pressure of events. She put a hand for support upon the table before her and felt, but did not think to end, the unpleasant shrinking of her flesh communicated by her fingers scraping the wood where they bunched the cloth beneath them.
She was Lady Burdon...!
II
With that amazement singing in her ears, and recovered from the first effects of her bewilderment, she went quickly to the door and excitedly up the stairs. She was thirty-five; they called her pretty; and certainly she made an attractive presence as she came to the threshold of the room where she sought her husband. Her entry was abrupt: a quick jerk on the door handle, the door wide open and she with a sudden movement standing there, tense, animated, a flush on her cheeks, sparkle in her eyes, and a high, glad, strange note in the "Maurice!" that she cried. "Maurice!"
"Con-found!" came the answer. "Conster-nation!" and illustrating the reason of the words, a fleck of blood came through the snowy lather on a chin in process of being shaved.
Mr. Letham—portly; forty; pleasant of countenance in a loose-lipped, good-natured fashion; in a shirt and trousers before the looking-glass; pain on face; finger firmly on the blood stain; razor in the other hand—Mr. Letham peered short-sightedly into the mirror, made a very squeamish stroke with the razor in the vicinity of the wound, and, quickly over his concern, pleasantly addressed his wife.
"'Morning, old girl. I say, you made me jump. Am I so fearfully late? What's for breakfast?"
He did not turn to face her. Viewed from behind, half-hitched trousers and bulging shirt, he had a lumpish appearance, and it was the more inelegant for the contortions of his arms and shoulders, characteristic of a clumsy shaver.