She glanced at him.
“What is it you wish to say?” she inquired briefly.
Bryton indicated with his hand a couple of chairs in a corner near by, and, after a moment’s hesitation, she took one of them.
“You’ve got to pull out of this company of his at once,” he said, in a hard voice, as he dropped down beside her.
Marion Gray’s eyes widened, and a little color crept into her face.
“You’re a cool proposition,” she remarked, “to tell me what I must, or must not, do. Do you imagine for an instant that I would break a contract, and desert a man the very day before the opening? I thought you knew that I always played fair.”
“Yah!” snarled Bryton. “You—play fair! A lot you do! Where’s your gratitude? Tell me that! You owe everything you’ve got—the very clothes on your back—to my father. Didn’t he take you in when you were starving, and treat you like a daughter? Didn’t he give you his name, which wasn’t good enough for you when you took to the stage? Didn’t he leave you a pile of money, which kept you till you got a job with Rosenbaum? That was my money! It should have come to me! You practically robbed me of it. And now you stick by Demarest, who doesn’t care a hang about you, and let me go——”
“Stop!”
The girl’s face was pale, but her eyes flashed angrily.
“You’ve said quite enough, Ralph Bryton,” she went on, in a cold, cutting voice, “to show me what sort of a man you really are, even if I hadn’t a pretty good notion of it before. A good deal of what you have said is true, but no one but a contemptible hound would have said it in the way you did. Your father did adopt me, and as long as he lived I loved him. He was more of a man than you’ll ever be. The money he left me wasn’t much, but it enabled me to live until I found something to do. The reason I didn’t take your father’s name was because it was yours, too.”