Some two or three years before the commencement of this story there arose a difference between the manager of the property and Lady Ushant, and she was made to understand, after some half-courteous manner, that Bragton house and park would do better without her.

There would be no longer any cows kept, and painters must come into the house, and there were difficulties about fuel.

She was not turned out exactly; but she went and established herself in lonely lodgings at Cheltenham.

Then Mary Masters, who had lived for more than a dozen years at Bragton, went back to her father's house in Dillsborough.
Any reader with an aptitude for family pedigrees will now understand that Reginald, Master of Hoppet Hall, was first cousin to the father of the Foreign Office paragon, and that he is therefore the paragon's first cousin once removed.

The relationship is not very distant, but the two men, one of whom was a dozen years older than the other, had not seen each other for more than twenty years,--at a time when one of them was a big boy, and the other a very little one; and during the greater part of that time a lawsuit had been carried on between them in a very rigorous manner.