"All right!" Michael explained. "You need not believe me if you don't like. I don't care, since I have done what I wanted to. Bar chaff, Henry, I am telling you the truth. The girl appears to be a young woman of decision. She explained at once her circumstances, and it struck us both that to go through the ceremony of marriage would smooth all our difficulties. We can easily get the bond annulled later on."
"I am off to town to-night. You won't mind, will you?" Michael went on. "Just to see if everything is all right, and to get her guardian's consent and a special license, and I shall be back by the six o'clock train on Thursday in time to get the ceremony over that night; and then, by the early morning express, if you'll wait till then, we'll go South together, and so for Paris and freedom!"
Michael laughed. "Oh, she may go to the moon, for all I care; she leaves directly after the ceremony with her certificate of marriage, which she means to brandish in the face of her relations, who are staying at the Inn, and so exit out of my life! It is only an affair of expediency."
Michael frowned, and his firm chin looked aggressive.
"It is nothing of the kind. You told me yourself that you would rather marry old Bessie--a woman of eighty-four--than Violet Hatfield; and now, when I have found a much more suitable person--a pretty little lady--you begin to talk. My mind is made up, and there is an end of it."
"Bessie would have been much more suitable--a plain pretext; but you have no idea what complications you may be storing up for yourself by marrying a young girl--What is the sense in it?" he continued, a little excited now. "The younger and prettier she is makes her all the more unsuitable to be used merely as a tool in your game. Confound it, Michael!"
"And her game, too," his host reminded him. His eyes were flashing now, and that expression, which all his underlings knew meant he intended to have his own will at any cost, grew upon his face.
"You forget that in Scotland divorce is not an impossibility and--_I am going to do it, Henry_. Now, I had better write to old Fergusson, my chaplain, and tell him to be in readiness, and I suppose I ought to see my lawyers in Edinburgh, although, as there are no settlements and it is just between ourselves, perhaps it does not matter about them."