"Have you any engagement?"
"No, but I can easily make one. I am not going to break bread with your lawyer friend. So long as he is at Penmorval I shall be missing."
"My dear Bothwell, you have no right to be angry at a simple question which you might have so easily answered," remonstrated Wyllard gravely.
"It was a question which I did not choose to answer, and which he had no right to ask. It was an outrage to ask such a question—to press it as he did. Fifty years ago he might have been shot for a lesser insult. By Jove, I never felt more sorry that the good old duelling days are over—the days when one man could not insult another with impunity."
"How savage you are, Bothwell, and against a man who was only in the exercise of his profession!"
"He had no right to question me as if I were a murderer," retorted Bothwell savagely. "Did he think that I spent my time in Plymouth plotting that girl's death? If I had made up my mind to push a woman over an embankment, I should not have wanted to spend a day in Plymouth in order to plan the business. A murder of that kind must be touch and go—no sooner thought of than done."
"All trouble would have been saved, my dear fellow, if you had given a straight answer to a simple question."
"To answer would have been to acknowledge his right to question me. No judge would have allowed counsel to have asked such a motiveless question. Nowhere except at a petty rustic inquiry would such a thing be permitted."
"I can only say that you are needlessly angry, Bothwell," said Wyllard. "Here comes Distin. You had better drive home with us."
"No, thank you; I shall be home before the house shuts up; but you'll see no more of me to-night."