Mr. Wadislaw passed his hand across his forehead and Adrian, seeing this familiar sign of impending trouble, felt that his place was at his father’s side rather than in quelling that slight disturbance in the adjoining room. He took his stand behind the banker’s chair and rested his hand upon it.
Mr. Wadislaw cast a hurried, appealing glance upward, and the son smiled and nodded. The contractor moved about the place, tapping the walls, the floor, and the great chimney beside the safe; pausing at this spot and listening, tapping afresh, listening again, with a marked interest growing in his face.
But nobody noticed this, for, suddenly, the door slid open and there stood in the aperture a girl with wonderful, flowing hair and a face strangely stern and defiant.
“Margot!”
But it was not at Adrian she looked. At last she was in the presence of the man who had ruined her father. And—he knew her! Aye, knew her, though they two had never met before and, as yet, she had spoken no accusing word. For he had sunk back in his seat, his face white, his eyes staring, his jaw dropped. To him she was an apparition, one risen from the dead to confront him with the darkest hour of all his past, when a broken-hearted wife had kneeled to him, begging her husband’s life. Yet it was broad daylight and he wide awake.
“Are you Malachi Wadislaw?”
“I—I—thought you were dead!”
“No, not dead. Alive and come at last to make you right the wrong you did my father. To make you open his prison doors and set him free.”
“Are you Philip Romeyn’s wife? Her hair—his eyes—I—I—am confused—Adrian!”