If Mrs. Kildare had noticed, she would have been more than a little astonished by the vision of shy and awkward James Thorpe, one of the leading psychologists of the country, capering nimbly in a lady's chamber under the guidance of her eldest child. But she did not notice.
"Do you know what this means?" she said, after a long silence. "It means that we have won, my dear. The very judge who tried him!"
Philip nodded, without speaking.
Her hand groped for his and clung to it. As the sisters of Lazarus must have felt when he who was dead came to them out of the tomb in his cere-cloths, so these two felt now. After seventeen years, the thing they had vainly hoped and striven for was about to be granted—not justice (it was too late for that), but mercy, freedom. And after seventeen years, what was a man to do with freedom?
"I am—frightened, a little," Philip said at last, turning to her. "What am I to do with father?"
"You are to bring him straight to me. No, I will go with you and bring him home myself."
"Home? To Basil Kildare's house?"
She lifted her head, "What matter whose house? We shall be married at once."
He said in a low voice, "Have you forgotten—the will?"