The lawyer laughed pleasantly. "No, on my honour. I did go about to some of the sights whilst waiting for my business; but they did not detain me by one unnecessary hour. What is it that you want with me?"
They entered the hotel, and Chattaway took him into a private room, unwashed and unrefreshed as the traveller was, and laid the case before him: the sudden appearance of the mysterious stranger at Barbrook, his open avowal that he had come to depose Chattaway from the Hold in favour of Rupert Trevlyn.
"But who is he?" inquired Mr. Flood.
"A lawyer," was the reply—for you must remember that Chattaway could only speak in accordance with the supposed facts; facts that had been exaggerated to him. "I know nothing more about the man, except that he avows he has come to Barbrook to deprive me of my property, and take up the cause of Rupert Trevlyn. But he can't do it, you know, Flood. The Hold is mine, and must remain mine."
"Of course he can't," acquiesced the lawyer. "Why need you put yourself out about it?"
Mr. Chattaway was wiping the moisture from his face. He sat looking at the lawyer.
"I can't deny that it has troubled me," he said: "that it is troubling me still. What would my family do—my children—if we lost the Hold?"
It was the lawyer's turn to look. He could not make out Chattaway. No power on earth, so far as his belief and knowledge went, could wrest Trevlyn Hold from its present master. Why, then, these fears? Were they born of nervousness? But Chattaway was not a nervous man.
"Trevlyn Hold is as much yours as this hat"—touching the one at his elbow—"is mine," he resumed. "It came to you by legal bequest; you have enjoyed it these twenty years, and to deprive you of it is beyond human power. Unless," he added, after a pause, "unless indeed——"
"Unless what?" eagerly interrupted Chattaway, his heart thumping against his side.