For a moment old Flint sat there motionless and staring. Then, moving his head forward with a peculiar, pecking twitch that still further enhanced his likeness to a buzzard, he stammered:
"You—you mean—?"
"I mean just what I say. Your daughter has severed the betrothal. Haven't you noticed my ring was gone from her finger?"
"Gone? Bless my soul, no—that is, yes—maybe. I don't know. But—but at any rate, I thought nothing of it. So then, you say—she's broken it off? But, why? And when? And—and tell me, Wally, what's it all about?"
"Listen, and I will tell you," Tiger answered. "And I'll give it to you straight. I'm partly at fault. Mostly so, it may be. Let me assume all the blame, at any rate. I'm not sparing myself and have no intention of doing so. My conduct, I admit, was beastly. No excuses offered. All I want to do, now, is to make the amende honorable, be forgiven, and have the former status resumed."
Thus spoke Waldron. But all the time his soul lay hot within him, at having so to humble himself before Flint; at being thus obliged to eat crow, and fawn and feign and creep.
"If I didn't need your billion, old man," his secret thought was, as he eyed Flint with pretended humility, "you might go to Hell, for all of me—you and your daughter with you, damn you both!"
The Billionaire sat blinking, for a moment. Then, picking up a pencil and idly scrawling pothooks on the big clean sheet of blotting-paper that covered his reference-book table, beside which the men were sitting, he asked:
"Well, what's the trouble all about? What are the facts? I must have those, in full, before I can guarantee to do anything toward changing my daughter's opinion. Much as I deplore her action, Wally, I don't know whether she's right or wrong, till you tell me. Now, let's have it."
"I will," the other answered; and he was as good as his word. Realizing the prime futility of any subterfuge, or any misstatement of fact—which Catherine would surely discover and tell her father, and which would react against him—Waldron began at the beginning and narrated the entire affair, with every detail precisely accurate. Nay, he even exaggerated the offensiveness of his conduct, at the Longmeadow Club, and in various ways gave the Billionaire to understand that he was a more serious offender than in truth he really was. For, after all, the only real offense was the lack of any compatibility between the girl and himself—the total absence of love.