The door behind him slammed violently, and then for the first time he turned. He had thought her gone--angry, as she was often angry, at his mild joking. Instead he saw her standing there, one hand behind her in the action with which she had swung-to the door, the other clutching the newspaper all rumpled up against her bosom; and there was that in her face, in her eyes, and in the tremble of her parted lips that made him change the easy, tolerant smile and the light banter with which he turned to her. "Only my silly fun, Nelly," he began. "What is it? Some howler in the newspaper? Let's have a--" Then appreciated the pose, the eyes, the parted lips; and changed nervously to: "Eh? Eh? What is it? What's up?"
She broke out: "Your fun! Will you only listen! It's true--true what I tell you! You are Lord Burdon." Angry and incoherent she became, for her husband blinked at her, and looked untidy and looked doltish. "He's unmarried. I was trying only the other day to interest you in what that meant. When his uncle died last August I spoke to you about it--"
Mr. Letham, blinking, more untidy, more doltish: "Who's unmarried?"
And she cried at him: "Young Lord Burdon! Young Lord Burdon is dead! He's been killed in the fighting in India--"
Mr. Letham laid down his razor--slowly, letting the handle slip noiselessly from his fingers to the dressing-table. Slowly also he lifted his face towards his wife, and she saw his mild forehead all puckered, his eyes dimmed with a bemused air, his loose mouth parted: she particularly saw the comical aspect given to his perturbation by its setting of little patches of soap with the little trickle of red at the chin.
He put out a hand for the paper and made a slow step towards her. "Eh?" he said--a kind of bleat, it sounded to her.
"No! Listen!" she told him. "Listen to this at the end of the account," and she spread the sheet in her hands. A little difficult to find the place ... a little difficult to control her voice.... "Listen!" and she found and read aloud, in jerky sentences, the paragraph that had been made out of "cuttings about Lord Burdon."
Almost in a whisper the vital clause "_...the successor is of a very remote branch--Mr. Maurice Redpath Letham, whose paternal great-grandfather was the eighth baron...._"