“Show him in here.”
Mr. Fenton rose. “Hadn’t I better go to him?”
“Show him in here.”
“Yes, my lord.”
The footman withdrew, and in a minute Hugh came into the library. He was very white as he went forward to the man who had taken Sydney from them. Neither attempted any conventional greeting, and Mr. Fenton’s murmured introduction was unheard by both.
“So you are Hugh Chichester?” St. Quentin said. “Tell me—if I wire to your father and mother to come down to Sydney, will they come?”
“Is she worse?” Hugh’s voice was metallic in the effort that he made to keep it steady.
“No!” St. Quentin spoke so loudly as to make the lawyer jump. “Tell me, would they come?”
Hugh laughed unsteadily. The question seemed to him almost a mockery. “They’d come to her from the world’s end,” he said.
St. Quentin filled hastily a telegraph form with the words: