He rose, put on his hat, tucked the thick stick under his arm, and advanced a few steps toward Rosamond.
"I am going now," he said. "Would you like to shake hands?"
Rosamond turned her back on him contemptuously.
Mr. Treverton chuckled with an air of supreme satisfaction.
Meanwhile Leonard, who sat near the fire-place, and whose color was rising angrily once more, had been feeling for the bell-rope, and had just succeeded in getting it into his hand as Mr. Treverton approached the door.
"Don't ring, Lenny," said Rosamond. "He is going of his own accord."
Mr. Treverton stepped out into the passage—then glanced back into the room with an expression of puzzled curiosity on his face, as if he was looking into a cage which contained two animals of a species that he had never heard of before. "I have seen some strange sights in my time," he said to himself. "I have had some queer experience of this trumpery little planet, and of the creatures who inhabit it—but I never was staggered yet by any human phenomenon as I am staggered now by those two." He shut the door without saying another word, and Rosamond heard him chuckle to himself again as he walked away along the passage.
Ten minutes afterward the waiter brought up a sealed letter addressed to Mrs. Frankland. It had been written, he said, in the coffee-room of the hotel by the "person" who had intruded himself into Mr. and Mrs. Frankland's presence. After giving it to the waiter to deliver, he had gone away in a hurry, swinging his thick stick complacently, and laughing to himself.
Rosamond opened the letter.
On one side of it was a crossed check, drawn in her name, for Forty Thousand Pounds.