“And now to bluff it!” said he to himself.
In a few minutes a servant knocked at the door.
“Come in!” cried his master.
The man’s face was white, and his manner full of alarm.
“There’s a gentleman who wishes to see you, sir. I showed him into the drawing-room. I think, sir, it’s—it’s Mr. Richard,” he ended, in a lower voice, as if announcing a visitor from the other world.
To his astonishment, his master sprang up with an appearance of the greatest eagerness; and echoing the name as if it filled him with joy, he hastened through the hall to the drawing-room, and entered with outstretched hands.
Before the west window, in the full stream of light from the declining sun, stood the man who for seventeen years had been the victim of his cruelty and greed. It is not in human nature, even in the springtime of youth, to recover in a few months from the effects of the confinement of years. Gilbert Wryde’s son showed in his prematurely grey hair, in the sharpened outlines of his face, in a certain indefinable look of weariness and waiting in his grey eyes, as well as in the deep lines about his mouth, the effects of his cruel imprisonment.
He turned immediately when the door opened, and confronted John Bradfield with such a look that the latter instantly changed his intention of seizing his visitor by both hands. John felt indefinably that it would be like shaking hands with a marble statue, and he did not want any more chilling. He was sufficiently master of himself, however, to affect a boisterous delight at the meeting.
“Come here, come here; sit down,” said he. “Let us understand—let us know each other. I have heard to-day such things about you that if you had not come of your own accord, I would have hunted over the world until I had found you.”
But the visitor remained standing.