“Yes.”
“Ugh!” and he jerked one leg over the chair; “confound his sense of duty, risking his reputation to ease some old woman’s temper.”
Catherine looked at him with a quivering of the lips.
“Porteus, you can’t blame him. It seems hard that one slip may undermine so much.”
“Why ‘undermine’?—why ‘undermine’? The law does not expect infallibility.”
“I know—but then—the man died.”
“Who? What man?”
“Farmer Baxter, of Boland’s Farm.”
“A fool who has been eating himself to death for years.”
Catherine spread her open hands with the look of a pathetic partisan.