For answer Mary ran down into the little parlour.
“John!” she cried wildly, and the next moment she was clinging to John Grange’s neck, while he stood there with one arm about her, holding her tightly to him, and proudly facing her father and Barnett, who stood scowling and trying hard to speak.
Chapter Twenty Three.
In the dead silence which fell upon all in the bailiff’s room when Mary Ellis flung herself upon John Grange’s neck, a looker-on might have counted sixty beats of the pendulum which swung to and fro in the old oak-cased “grandfather’s clock,” before another word was uttered.
Mrs Ellis stood with her face working, as if premonitory to bursting out into a fit of sobbing; James Ellis felt something rising in his throat, and looked on with a grim kind of jealous pleasure at the lovers’ embrace; and Barnett broke the silence by making a strange grinding noise with his teeth.
“Do you—are you going to allow this?” he panted out at last.
James Ellis made a deprecating gesture with his hands, and looked uneasily at his wife, who had crossed to Grange, laid her hands upon his shoulder, and said gently—
“And we thought you were dead—we thought you were dead.”