"It is too true. The defence has done everything in its power to accumulate costs, and they are heavy. Under the most rigid taxation, they could not be reduced a hundred dollars."
"Fifteen hundred dollars!" Malcolm's face was pale, and his lips trembled. "Then all is, indeed, hopeless! Mr. Dunbar!" he resumed, with some energy, after a brief pause, "in simple justice you ought to pay these costs, and resume the prosecution on an amended bill."
"Ah! And why so?" There was something insulting in the attorney's manner, which aroused the feelings of his client.
"You are to blame for losing the suit, and, in common justice, should make good what your ignorance or neglect has lost."
"Ignorance or neglect!" exclaimed Dunbar, his face instantly suffused. "Do you know whom you are addressing?"
"I think I ought to know by this time," returned Malcolm, who was fast losing control of himself. "I am talking to a lawyer who has lost me an important suit, through a flaw in his bill, of which the merest legal tyro would be ashamed."
"You will repent this," said Dunbar, setting his teeth closely together. "I never pass by an insult from friend or foe."
"I can never repent knowing you more bitterly than I now do."
"You are mistaken," coolly replied Dunbar, who had regained his self-possession. "You will repent it far more bitterly."
There was something so full of meaning in the way this was uttered, that Malcolm was startled by it. At that moment he remembered that all he had in the world could be swept from his possession in a moment by the lawyer, whose property, by virtue of a sheriff's sale, it really was. Conscious, at the same time, of the folly of provoking a man who had him so fully in his power, he withheld the insulting retort that was on his lips, and turning away abruptly, left the office.