“You mean—”
“I mean, my pretty young lady, that if he chooses to pay the new rent he is entitled to stay.”
“You have raised his rent?—a poor old man of seventy-five?”
“I have no power to do that. But I understand he has had the land for next to nothing. It is worth more now.”
“Mr Pottinger,” said Miss Rosalind, “let me tell you that if you have any hand in this wicked business you are a bad man, whatever you profess to be. I shouldn’t sleep to-night if I failed to tell you that. So is everybody who dares treat an old man thus.”
“Pardon me, Miss Oliphant, that is not quite respectful to your own father.”
She rounded on him with trembling lips.
“My father,” she began and faltered—“my father is not the sort of man to do a thing of this kind unless he were cajoled into it by some—some—some one like you, Mr Pottinger—”
With which she left the room, much to the lawyer’s relief, who tried to laugh to himself at the pretty vixen, but couldn’t be as merry as he would have wished.
Rosalind, on her return to Maxfield, went straight with flashing eyes to Roger’s room, and told him the story.