“That might have been true,” said Colonel Piercey, with something of his old stiffness and severity, “if——”
“It is true,” she said, “I am of the family of my child.”
“Oh,” he cried, “what folly, at your age! I was angry to have lost you; but now, I can’t tell how it is, you are Meg Piercey again.”
“You have got used to my changed looks,” she said. “You have accepted the fact that I am no longer in my teens. But this is not worth discussing when there is so much more to think of. What shall you do? or, indeed, what can you do?”
“Fight it, certainly,” he said. “As soon as I have taken you home, I am to meet old Pownceby, and lay the whole case before the best man we can get. Thank Heaven, I am not without means to fight it out. Poor Uncle Giles! It is hard to call him up to a reckoning before all the world; but he could not have meant it; he could never have meant it.”
“I have his little tip for Osy,” said Margaret, with tears in her eyes.
“His little tip! when he ought to have provided for the boy!”
“Poor Uncle Giles! He was never very strong: and I believe she was very kind to him, and he was fond of her.”
“Do you want me to accept this absurd will, this loss to the race, because she was kind to him (granting that)—and an old man, in his dotage, was fond of a scheming woman?”
“Don’t call names,” said Margaret. “He was not in his dotage. We saw him——”