“I prefer to think,” said Dick, gravely, “that he has tried so long to believe that I was insane that the forced belief has injured his own brain.”
“Very kind of you to put it like that. You forgive him then?”
The answer came, short and sharp:
“No. You can’t forgive the man who has robbed you of seventeen years of life, and youth, and hope. If I had forgiven him, I should not have insulted the cur by offering him a pension.”
The lawyer shrugged his shoulders.
“You don’t understand the world, Mr. Wryde. Nobody minds such an insult as that.”
“It’s a satisfaction to me, at all events,” answered Richard, simply.
But he would not have been so magnanimous if he had not known that Chris was waiting to meet him in the meadow by the barn.
Later in the day Mr. Bradfield came across Stelfox, who was enjoying the victory he had been the means of bringing about too greatly to leave the scene of it with undue haste. His late master, who had recovered his spirits a little, addressed him, with some abruptness, in the following manner:
“Stelfox, you’re a scoundrel.”