"No, sir. Not exactly that. But I couldn't fight him in Miss Meg's presence."
"Yet, from what you have told me, I gather that Mr. Armathwaite is a gentleman?"
"He has all the airs of one," said Walker.
"And he must have thought you had behaved discourteously to his cousin before he would use actual violence towards you!"
"Nothing of the sort, sir. Miss Meg jumped down my throat for no reason whatever. Of course, Mr. Armathwaite hadn't heard the beginning of it, and may have imagined I was to blame, but I wasn't."
"Perhaps there is an explanation that may be news to you. You are not aware, I take it, that Mrs. Garth is now Mrs. Ogilvey?"
"By jing!" cried Walker, rather forgetting himself, "that's the name Tom Bland tried to tell me, but he couldn't rightly get his tongue round it."
"Probably. But don't you see the bearing this important fact has on to-day's proceedings? I have reason to believe that Mrs. Garth and her daughter disagreed with Mr. Garth before his death. At any rate, she seems to have married again within a very short time, and Miss Meg may have fancied that you were trying purposely to insult and annoy her by referring to a bygone tragedy. The mere presence of this Mr. Armathwaite, who is wholly unknown here, lends color to that assumption. He may be a 'cousin' by the second marriage. It is even conceivable that Mrs. Ogilvey, as Mrs. Garth now is, did not wish her second husband's relatives to know of the way in which her first husband met his death. The fact that Mr. Armathwaite rented the Grange can be regarded as nothing more than an ordinary coincidence. Isn't it possible, Mr. Walker, that you blundered very seriously in thrusting yourself into Miss Meg's presence, and forcing an unpalatable revelation on her?"
Walker's red face positively blanched. For one instant his nerve failed him.
"I never thought of that," he muttered, in dire confusion.