"I fear the days may seem to drag heavily for you, Miss Beecham," the old gentleman resumed, without a shadow of softening in the coldness of his voice or the scrutiny of his glance. "I have thought—to relieve their tedium—that you might like a horse. I will have one broken for your use. There are pretty rides about."
"I do not know how to ride, sir," said Meg, touched and bewildered by the thoughtfulness and repellent manner of her host.
"My old groom would teach you; he is a most trustworthy and respectable man," said Sir Malcolm.
"Thank you sir," said Meg. Then with desperate courage, as her benefactor seemed about to retire, she added breathlessly: "I should not feel lonely, sir—not—if you would let me be with you a little—if you would let me read for you, or do something for you. You have been so good to me all those years."
The old gentleman bowed hastily; the expression of his cold glance seemed to grow colder as he replied: "I assure you, Miss Beecham, you need feel yourself under no obligation to me for what I have done. It is very little."
"Little! It was everything to me!" said Meg hurriedly, her voice trembling with restrained emotion. "You twice saved me from a wretched fate. But for you, sir, as you told me on that evening you took me back to school, I would have been as uncared for as a workhouse child."
"I wish, if you will allow me distinctly to state my wishes, that allusion to the past be dropped between us. I can repeat only that you are under no obligation," replied her host, his thin lips remaining tense in their cruel firmness of line, his glance courteously repellent. "When the case was pointed out to me it became my plain duty to do what I did."
"I do not understand; I only know that if you had not been good to me I should have been ignorant and homeless," answered Meg with reckless iteration.
There was a pause, Sir Malcolm frowned, then he said with the same impassible frigidity:
"If you choose, Miss Beecham, to consider that you are under a debt of gratitude to me, allow me to say that you will express it in the manner most agreeable to me by never referring to the subject."