"Did you give me your daughter for the same season? Did you, Leslie——"
There was a deep silence in which the attention of all was focussed on the girl.
"Mr. Beekman," she said, in a cold, hard voice, though her eyes were softly eager, "will you tell me once for all whether you're going to pardon my father?"
"I certainly am not going to pardon him," declared Beekman.
Leslie favoured him with a little stinging laugh.
"Then you'd better know the rest. Yes, it is true that my father gave me to you—I gave myself to you for that very reason, and no other.... I made a big mistake; so did he. We should have made our bargain before we took that step. It would have been better." She paused to take breath, and presently went on in a voice that rankled: "You talked once to me of equals—and when you got this office you thought, at last, that you were my equal. I know better; you're my inferior. And I want you to know and to understand—and understand it clearly—that the Wilkinsons do not mate with cowards." And with that she drew off her ring and placed it before him, crying: "There!"
An instant later, Leslie, strangling a sob that threatened to escape, hurriedly fled from the room, her father and Flomerfelt following closely on her heels.
XIX
In common with most men who have attained their ambition to be money-kings, Peter V. Wilkinson regarded the legal profession solely in the light of the ability of its members to provide processes for him by means of which the law could be evaded. Failing in that or in their promises of immunity from imprisonment,—which is much more to the point in this case,—their usefulness, naturally, ceased. Accordingly, from time to time, one after another of his superfluous counsel had been dropped, even Patrick Durand, able criminal lawyer as he was acknowledged to be, being forced to content himself with a handsome souvenir of his connection with the case, to the exclusion of any further interest in the expected spoils. Obviously, the old Colonel was retained, but even this field marshal of a hundred campaigns, when he arrived at the Wilkinson suite in the Remsen at Albany in response to Wilkinson's imperative summons, had to acknowledge that the battle of his life—the last battle of what he called the running fight—was on, and likely, so at least it looked at the present time, to be his Waterloo.