“Word for word as far as I can recollect; what he says you shall hear.”
“Then I may save him,” he continued.
“If money—” began Grace, but he stopped her.
“I am not indifferent to money,” was the reply, “but I never work for it alone. A thousand pounds paid down could never quicken my intellect as much as a perfect knowledge of a case. With Scott I am utterly at sea. He will not confide in me, and I do not know what to do for him. And the Assizes are close at hand, that is the worst of it.”
“I shall see you again before the week is out,” said Grace. “Meantime—” and she laid some notes on the table, which the lawyer folded up and handed to her once again.
“Money could do no more than I have tried to accomplish,” he remarked. “When it is all over pay me if you will.”
“Upon the whole, Miss Moffat,” criticized her travelling companion, “it seems to me the rogues have the best of it in this life. No honest man could find a lawyer like that,” which is no doubt true. Perhaps it is part of the Eternal Justice to leave one world in which the rogues and the thieves and the plausible soft-spoken vagabonds have the best of it.
Spite of all the clergy tell us I am afraid, notwithstanding the hard lines many ragamuffins meet with, the paradise of sinners is earth.
Straight from Kilcurragh to Maryville drove Grace. Her travelling companion saw her and her slender luggage safely bestowed on the outside car, by which vehicle she elected to travel, and then made his farewell.
“Good-bye, Miss Moffat,” he said; “I shall watch the progress of the case with interest and anxiety.”