If Steer heard he gave no sign, but his ears looked very red. When his hurrying cart was a speck at the top of the steep rise, Bowden turned a little towards his son. “I want to make that chap sweat,” he said. “Ah!” answered Ned. But how to make Steer sweat without sweating themselves? That was what exercised the Bowdens, each according to his lights and circumstances, which, of course, were very different. Even in this quandary they did not mention the girl Pansy. To do so would have been to touch on feeling; both felt it better to keep to facts and to devices. It was Bowden who put the finishing touch to a long and devious silence. “If yu don’ du nothin’, Ned, I don’ see how they can ’ave yu. Yu’ve not putt nothin’ on paper. How’m they to tell yu don’ mean to marry her? I’d let ’em stew in their own juice. Don’t yu never admit it. Drop word to that lawyer chap that yu’m not guilty.” Ned nodded, but underneath his stolidity he could not help feeling that it was not so simple as all that. By him, though not yet quite tired of the girl Pansy, his first choice had begun to be faintly desired again--her refinement ‘in the distance enchanted’ was regaining some of its attraction to his cooling blood. What would have been the course of events but for Steer’s next action is, indeed, uncertain. V In having the law of ‘those two fellers,’ Steer had passed through an experience with his niece which had considerably embittered feelings already acid. The girl had shown a ‘ladylike’ shrinking from pressing a man who had ceased to want her. There was an absolute difference between her wishes and her uncle’s. He would not have young Bowden marry her for anything; he just wanted revenge on the Bowdens. She wanted young Bowden still; but if she couldn’t get him, would cry quietly and leave it at that. The two points of view had been irreconcilable till Steer, taking the bit between his teeth, had assured his niece that to bring the action was the only way of dragging young Bowden back to her. This gave him a bad conscience, for he was fond of his niece, and he really felt that to bring the action would make that fellow Bowden stick his toes in all the more and refuse to budge. He thought always of Bowden and of the five hundred that would come out of _his_ pocket, not out of Ned’s.