"It is not my daughter who is coming to the Hall after your son," Roger Pettingdale went on. "It is your son who is coming here after my daughter. You seem to forget that point. You say it must be stopped. And I repeat—Why don't you stop it?"
"It is as I thought," shouted the enraged Squire. "You are all in it—all of you. All in the scheme to entrap him! A pretty plot, don't you call it, for a man who poses as a Christian?"
In a blind access of fury he took a step forward and raised his riding-whip. And then his shaking arm fell to his side, for Roger Pettingdale had laid a hand upon his shoulder, and was confronting him with grave, kindly, pitying eyes.
"You are in anger, Squire Leigh," he said, with simple dignity, "else I should take your words as an insult. Be sure that the Pettingdales have not fallen so low, nor their womenkind either, that they need to trap the son of Squire Leigh. But I tell you this, as man to man: if your son truly loves my daughter, and if she loves him in return, I will put no bar before my child's happiness; no, not for you, nor for all the Leighs in the world. We come of as good a stock as you, Squire! Remember that! More money and more land maybe you have—but not more pride of family. I care naught for your money or your land. Thank God! I have prospered beyond all expectation. And I tell you again, straight to your face, if your son comes to me and asks for my daughter's hand, and I find it is for her happiness, I shall say 'Yes.'"
"I shall disinherit him!" burst forth the Squire; "he shall not have a penny—not a brass farthing!"
"I shall tell him," continued Roger Pettingdale, "that if he would win my daughter, he must first make a position for himself in the world, independently of aught you can do for or against him; and that shall be the test of his sincerity."
Then he turned away, and the Squire, his face livid with passion, marched off, savagely cutting at the wheat-ears with his riding-whip. And when he mounted his horse at the corner of the field, he dug his spurs so viciously into her that she bounded and reared, and almost threw him.
Well, the long and short of it was that Edward Leigh was not found wanting in the test which was imposed upon him.
"You are quite right, sir," he said to Roger Pettingdale; "the condition is a reasonable one. I ask for nothing more than the chance of proving that I am in earnest."
He went to London, studied under his father's old college friend, John Wetherell, the well-known Queen's Counsel, and in five years was making fair headway in the courts as a barrister. And the strange part of it was that the choleric old Squire—who has a good heart underneath his rough exterior—seeing his son's name in the papers from time to time, felt his paternal pride rising within him despite his stubborn resentment. Perhaps, too, he felt lonely in his old age. At all events, he went over to the farm one day, and asked to see Mary.