"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.