"It was not so much against the matter as against the manner of your attack upon Sir Malcolm Loftdale that I appealed, and that you promised to alter," said Meg, unsoftened.
"I was strongly moved as I wrote," said the editor, who, somewhat to his surprise, found himself pleading before this young girl with eager self-justification. "The severity of the sentence passed upon the unhappy man—I know him and his poor wife—seemed to me so out of all proportion to the offense committed that I forgot everything else. It was only when I looked over the article in print that I realized how the tone of it might hurt you."
"How it might hurt him! It did hurt him! If it is a satisfaction to you to know it, the blow struck home. That allusion to the modern Brutus had its full effect. It went to his heart!" said Meg passionately, with flaming eyes.
"I will not pretend to say, Miss Beecham, except for the apparent neglect of my promise to you, that I would regret the effect of my words upon Sir Malcolm. By his coldness and harshness he drove his son to a piteous death."
"I know nothing of the story to which you allude; and I do not wish to know it. I will not hear it from the lips of an enemy of Sir Malcolm Loftdale," said Meg almost fiercely. "What I do know is, that if it is remorse or sorrow that darkens his old age, it is altogether too sacred a theme to be dragged into print and made the subject of a newspaper attack."
The editor was silent a moment, then he said: "You are right."
The gravity of his tone softened Meg; she hesitated a moment, then inclining her head she moved away.
"I wish you would retract what you said just now concerning your visit to my office," the editor began somewhat blunderingly—"that it was a reckless step—that you consider that it justified me in lightly promising and lightly breaking my pledge."
"You must acknowledge, then, that you forgot all that I said," replied Meg with the childlike bluntness which characterized her.