“Dad was worried over the affair and had a special sent him after he came up town.”
“Lucy, what are you talking about?”
“Why, what else but your father’s great deal to buy up the stock control of the T. Y. D. Q. Railroad, and the way those rascally friends of his turned traitor? It isn’t so killing, after all. Dad was down perfectly flat twelve years ago, and now he’s ten times to the good. What dad thought foolish was for him to realize on everything else he had to go into this shaky deal!”
“You mean that my father has failed! Then that accounts, oh, that accounts for it all!”
“You don’t say that you did not know it? What did you mean and what are you talking about? Your father hasn’t—” Fortunately the question that Lucy asked did not reach Brooke’s ears, for, pushing the instrument from her across the desk, she neither cried nor raved nor wrung her hands, but sitting forward in her father’s chair, very much the attitude he took when deep in thought, scarcely stirred for the quarter-hour. The visible signs of the years she lacked of being the age she really was came swiftly, and laid their hands upon hers, not empty hands nor yet filled with the trifles the years sometimes hold. Presently Courage entered her heart, and then its sponsors, Hope and Constancy.
Soon a muffled closing of the door at the lower end of the hall, and the approaching tiptoe tread of two people of uneven weights, brought her to her feet and into the crisis again. It was Lucy, who, with every vestige of flippancy gone, threw her arms around her friend’s neck and burst into tears, while Brooke held out her hand to Mr. Dean, meanwhile, looking him straight in the eyes, saying: “Thank you for coming. Do not trouble to conceal anything, only tell me the truth, and do it quickly,” not realising that in such cases truth-telling is not the simple thing that it is reckoned.
CHAPTER VII
THE DAY AFTER
There was a single day of incredulity and suspense, and then the fact of Adam Lawton’s financial downfall was made public through the papers, together with the names of those who had been swept from their feet in his company. As to his physical collapse, it was merely stated that he was ill at his department in the St. Hilaire, denied himself to all visitors, and would hold no communication even with his lawyer or business associates.