"Stop!" cried Morehead, alarmed lest he should betray to her their political secret.
"I mean I gave him my daughter," corrected the father, "everything I had."
Morehead stared at them a moment from under knitted brows. Presently he said:
"Peter, I'd send Leslie to him. This letter is only tentative."
"It's a refusal," gasped Wilkinson, hopelessly.
"It's a denial to me," explained Colonel Morehead. "But wait until he sees her! He'll have something different to say to her, I know."
And so it happened that the following day Leslie Wilkinson arrived at Albany to interview her betrothed on her father's behalf.
"I came to talk to you, Eliot, about my father," she began.
Beekman swayed in his chair. His eyes seemed sunken in his head, and his head ached from weariness and lack of sleep.