She steadied herself with one arm, and a slight cry of affright trembled upon her parted lips as Ferris sprang forward, crying "For God's sake, hear me! Just one word!"
But Boardman's heavy, restraining hand grasped the deserted husband's arm. "Mr. Ferris," he gravely said. "Our future course will be dictated by your behavior. You must only communicate with the Trading Company's lawyers on these affairs. As to the Worthington Estate, there is our representative, Mr. Witherspoon. And, in the interests of justice, bestir yourself now to find Randall Clayton's murderer.
"The chief of police has his eyes specially upon you, and so, I give you a fair warning."
Ferris, with flashing eyes, essayed to speak, but Boardman significantly ushered him to the door. "It is peace or war, as you will have it! We three men have all the secrets of the past. If you attempt, in the slightest degree, to annoy our principal, we will strike, and without mercy."
As the defeated husband drove home along the leafy borders of the beautiful Central Park—the one lovely oasis in New York's scattered maze of brick and iron monstrosity—he saw his life lying sere and yellow around him, his bare uplands scorched before their time.
"Ruin, ruin," he murmured, and a craven fear now possessed him—a fear born of his ignorance of the awful remorse of the dying hours of the Croesus, the moneyed giant cut off in the midst of all his schemes!
"How much do they know?" he murmured.
Rage filled his stormy heart; he would have struck back as madly as the blind rattlesnake but for the craven fears which now assailed him.
"I must await my time for revenge," he muttered. "One touch of publicity in this, and Senator Dunham would chase me out of America. He must, at the last, protect me, if only to save himself."
Stunned by the sudden onslaught of the girl whom he had supposed to be but a pliant, hoodwinked child, Ferris sat long pondering gloomily in his rooms at the Fifth Avenue, his head buried in his hands.