Miss Schuyler made a little sympathetic gesture, for he seemed very jaded and weary. “No,” she said. “One could not expect too much, but Hetty is your daughter, the only one you have, and for her mother’s sake you will at least do nothing that would embitter her life.”
Torrance looked at her with a curious smile. “There is nothing I could do. Larry and the rabble are our masters now; but I will see her once before I go away. Is there any other thing—that would be a little easier—I could do to please you?”
“Yes. You could release Mr. Breckenridge.”
Torrance turned and struck a bell. “I had almost forgotten him. Will you wait and see me do what you have asked me?”
In a few minutes more Breckenridge was ushered in. He smiled at Miss Schuyler, and made Torrance a slight, dignified salutation. Torrance acknowledged it courteously.
“You have yourself to blame for any inconvenience you have been put to, Mr. Breckenridge,” he said. “You conspired to assist your partner in an undertaking you could not expect me to forgive.”
“No,” said Breckenridge. “I offered to ride with Larry, and he would not have me. I went without him knowing it and made my plans myself?”
“This is the truth?”
Breckenridge straightened himself and looked at Torrance with a little flash in his eye. “You must take my word—I shall not substantiate it. If you had had an army corps of cut-throats ready to do what you told them that night, Larry would have gone alone.”
Torrance nodded gravely. “It is taken. At least, you bluffed us into following you.”