CHAPTER XVII.
SUNLIGHT THROUGH THE CLOUDS.
Richard could hardly dress quickly enough after he finished Tolman Bike’s letter. The indolent young man had never been seen in such frantic haste. The elevator seemed to him to creep. Rushing out to the street, he jumped into the first cab, telling the driver to make the best possible speed to Fifth Avenue.
With a sad, penitent face, Penelope Howard was impatiently awaiting her handsome lover in her own little room, her abject apologies all cut and dried for use. But he gave her no time.
“Penelope, the mystery is solved!” he yelled, and catching her in his strong arms, he held her so close to his heart that she gasped for breath.
“I’ve the story right here, sweetheart,” and in the fewest possible words, punctuated with Penelope’s exclamations of surprise and sorrow, Richard related all that had happened since the night before she went to Washington.
“My dear—Oh, Richard. Good morning,” said Penelope’s aunt, as she entered the room with bonnet on and a carriage-wrap thrown hastily over a house dress. “Mrs. Chamberlain has sent for me. They have just received news that Clara’s fiancée, Mr. Bike, was found dead in his bathroom, shot through the head. They think it was accidental, and poor Clara, who was to have been a bride this evening, is prostrated. I’ll be back presently, dear. Richard stay with the child.”
They let her go without a word of the information they possessed, and, oblivious to all else, they read Tolman Bike’s confession. Woman-like, Penelope was in tears, and had as much pity for the unhappy man as for the luckless girl.
“I knew he was the man,” Richard said. “When the messenger boy pointed out the man in the Hoffman House as looking like the man who got the gown, the resemblance struck me, though this man was fair and Tolman Bike was dark. The moment the resemblance struck me, the whole thing flashed before my mind. My ridiculous remark that probably the man was bleached, suggested to me the possibility of Maggie’s sister having bleached after she left home. Still, it was all so wild and improbable that I tried not to think of it.”
They decided only to tell the secret of the crime to those most concerned. That done, they effectually saved the name of Tolman Bike from deeper disgrace, little as he deserved it.
When Mrs. Van Brunt returned from the house where the preparations for wedding festivities had been turned into arrangements for a funeral, Penelope, with her eyes red from weeping, drew her aunt into her own little den where Richard was. Together they told the astonished woman the story of the crime, and she was more determined even than they were that the confession should be held sacred, since making it public could benefit no one, and would only serve to hurt the family who had expected to welcome him into their home as the husband of the daughter of the house.