“You are welcome, my friends,” he said, weakly. “And I thank you.”
Both men bowed gravely, and then the old man turned peeringly to Kenyon.
“And so, you have come at last! Welcome. But pardon; I cannot see you very well. My eyes are growing dim.”
He held out a shaking hand, and Kenyon took it in his strong clasp.
“It’s a sort of obsession,” Kenyon told himself, as he alternately looked at the sick man and those at his bedside. “I don’t know these people. I’ve never seen any of them before to-night, and they can’t possibly know me.”
And yet the supreme confidence of them all seemed to assure him that he was wrong. It was as though, in some odd way, a page had been torn from the book of his life—a page in which these characters had played a part, and which he had completely forgotten.
The weak old man exercised the same effect upon him as the check. He felt that he could not undertake another step in the matter until all had been made clear to him. To go groping forward in this way was distasteful, dishonest, criminal! Turning an irresolute look upon the others, he caught the dark, steadfast eyes of the girl of the hansom cab. His face flushed hotly.
“What a hesitating idiot she must think me,” he muttered, angrily. “She expects me to go ahead. So go ahead I will!”
The touch of his hand seemed somehow to give the old man strength.
“What a pity,” he said, waveringly, “that Nunez should not have lived. Ah, his was the brain to plan; his was the daring spirit to lead.” Then, eagerly, “Tell me of his end.”