'Quite the contrary,' Dick said; 'I have done more than I had any right to do to put an end to it.'
'Then it is ended?'
'I can't say.'
'It shall be ended,' shouted the colonel, making the table groan under his fist.
'In a manner,' Dick said, 'you are responsible for the whole affair. Do you remember when you were at Glen Quharity two or three years ago asking a parson called Rorrison, father of Rorrison the war correspondent, to use his son's Press influence on behalf of a Thrums man? Well, Angus is that man. Is it not strange how this has come about?'
'It is enough to make me hate myself,' replied the irate colonel, though it had not quite such an effect as that.
When his father had subsided a little, Dick told him of what had been happening in England during the last month or two. There had been a change of Government, but the chief event was the audacity of a plebeian in casting his eyes on a patrician's daughter. What are politics when the pipes in the bath-room burst?
'So you see,' Dick said in conclusion, 'I have acted the part of the unrelenting parent fairly well, and I don't like it.'
'Had I been in your place,' replied the colonel, 'I would have acted it a good deal better.'
'You would have told Angus that you considered him, upon the whole, the meanest thing that crawls, and that if he came within a radius of five miles of your daughter you would have the law of him? Yes; but that sort of trespassing is not actionable nowadays; and besides, I don't know what Mary might have said.'