“So I hear you tell me,” said I, with a good deal of heat.
“You are a very young man,” he repeated, “or you would have understood the significancy of the step.”
“I think you speak very much at your ease,” cried I. “What else was I to do? It is a fact I might have hired some decent, poor woman to be a third to us, and I declare I never thought of it until this moment! But where was I to find her, that am a foreigner myself? And let me point out to your observation, Mr. Drummond, that it would have cost me money out of my pocket. For here is just what it comes to, that I had to pay through the nose for your neglect; and there is only the one story to it, just that you were so unloving and so careless as to have lost your daughter.”
“He that lives in a glass house should not be casting stones,” says he; “and we will finish inquiring into the behaviour of Miss Drummond before we go on to sit in judgment on her father.”
“But I will be entrapped into no such attitude,” said I. “The character of Miss Drummond is far above inquiry, as her father ought to know. So is mine, and I am telling you that. There are but the two ways of it open. The one is to express your thanks to me as one gentleman to another, and to say no more. The other (if you are so difficult as to be still dissatisfied) is to pay me, that which I have expended and be done.”
He seemed to soothe me with a hand in the air. “There, there,” said he. “You go too fast, you go too fast, Mr. Balfour. It is a good thing that I have learned to be more patient. And I believe you forget that I have yet to see my daughter.”
I began to be a little relieved upon this speech and a change in the man’s manner that I spied in him as soon as the name of money fell between us.
“I was thinking it would be more fit—if you will excuse the plainness of my dressing in your presence—that I should go forth and leave you to encounter her alone?” said I.
“What I would have looked for at your hands!” says he; and there was no mistake but what he said it civilly.
I thought this better and better still, and as I began to pull on my hose, recalling the man’s impudent mendicancy at Prestongrange’s, I determined to pursue what seemed to be my victory.