Northwick did not seem to have taken the fact in, or else he could not appreciate it rightly. "Do you suppose," he whispered back, "that she'll speak to me?"
"Speak to you!"
"I didn't know. She was always so proud. But now I've brought back the money, all but the little I've had to use—"
There was a rustle of skirts on the stairs. Suzette stood a moment in the doorway, looking at her father, as if not sure he was real; then she flung herself upon him, and buried her face in his white beard, and kissed him with a passion of grief and love. She sank into his lap, with a long sigh, and let her head fall on his shoulder. All that was not simply father and daughter was for the moment annulled between them.
Adeline looked on admiring, while she kept about heating the water over her lamp; and they all took up fitfully the broken threads of their lives, and tried to piece them again into some sort of unity.
Adeline did most of the talking. She told her father how friends seemed to have been raised up for them in their need, when it was greatest. She praised herself for the inspiration she had in going to Putney for advice, because she remembered how her father had spoken of him that last night, and for refusing to give up the property to the company. She praised Putney for justifying and confirming her at every step, and for doing everything that could be done about the court. She praised the Hilarys, all of them, for their constancy to her father throughout, and she said she believed that if Mr. Hilary could have had his way, there never would have been any trouble at all about the accounts, and she wanted her father to understand just how the best people felt about him. He listened vaguely to it all. A clock in the next room struck four, and Northwick started to his feet. "I must go!"
"Go?" Adeline echoed.
"Why must you go?" said Suzette, clinging about him.
They were all silent in view of the necessity that stared them in the face.
Then Adeline roused herself from the false dream of safety in which her words had lulled her. She wailed out, "He's got to go! Oh, Suzette, let him go! He's got to go to prison if he stays!"