Peter V. Wilkinson was taken to his home in his big Mastodon car. With him, besides the chauffeur, were his daughter Leslie and Colonel Morehead. The news of the verdict, the sentence, and the release on bail had travelled even faster than the sixty-horse-power machine whose passengers had to fight their way through an impacted mass of humanity which filled the sidewalk and the street in front of Wilkinson's big place on the Drive. But then it was not every day that people had the chance to look upon an ex-multi-millionaire who had been sentenced to ten years at hard labour and had given a million-dollar bail!
With difficulty they reached the door, and a moment later it closed upon them.
"Where's Mrs. Wilkinson?" asked the multi-millionaire of the first footman he came across. And in an aside to Morehead: "I suppose the missus will have a few remarks to make."
He was informed that Mrs. Wilkinson was in her room and feeling poorly,—"Very, very poorly," the servant had been told to say,—a condition of late chronic with the lady. And she had developed another alarming condition: her increasing avoirdupois, the disappearance of the last remnants of her charms, the palpable bankruptcy of her husband, and her envy of her step-daughter Leslie—the only member of the household who still had grace of mind and face and figure, to say nothing of wealth—all these had developed in the lady a latent ferocity, a tigerish temper which seemed to hold unlimited force behind it. All over the great house her shrill virago's voice could be heard terrifying the servants; in short, her sudden rise to power was, perhaps, best described by another member of the household. "The missus rules the roost now," was the way her husband put it, and he knew whereof he spoke. Indeed, for that matter, Wilkinson, himself hitherto fearing no one, and priding himself in the fact, actually trembled now during the few moments that he was compelled to be in the lady's presence.
"Colonel, you've got to come with me," begun Wilkinson.
"Not I," was the brief refusal.
"You've got to come if I have to pay you to do it," insisted the husband. "I won't go up alone."
And Colonel Morehead would probably have used an even more forcible expression of refusal to do the husband's bidding had he known that at that very moment his right-hand man was closeted upstairs with his wife, and was telling her,— with one of his inscrutable smiles,—a smile that was intended to convey that it rested wholly with him whether Wilkinson would get off or not,—that Wilkinson was convicted, because the men who took the witness stand happened to tell the truth and had ended emphatically with: "The whole truth, and nothing but the truth."
But it happened that when they entered on tiptoe the lady's boudoir—Morehead having been finally persuaded, much against his will—the lady did not deign to acknowledge Morehead's presence, but sobbed out to her husband:
"You did not stop to consider me! Why did you let them do this thing to you? It all falls on me. The intolerable disgrace, shame, humiliation! You, a felon, a convict, a common thief, a forger!" One after another she hurled these epithets at him, while Flomerfelt discreetly withdrew.