He looked with a smile at her outstretched hands. “They wouldn’t stay on.”
“Don’t you carry them in sizes to fit all criminals?”
“I’ll have to put you on parole.”
“I’ll break it and climb out the window. Then I’ll run off with this.”
She indicated the box of treasure.
“I need that wash-stand in my room. I’m going to take it up there to-night,” he said. 155
“This isn’t a very good safety deposit vault,” she answered, and, nodding a careless good-night, she walked away in her slow-limbed, graceful Southern fashion.
She had carried it off to the last without breaking down, but, once in her own room, the girl’s face showed haggard in the moonlight. It was one thing to jest about it with him; it was another to face the facts as they stood. She was in the power of her father’s enemy, the man whose proffer of friendship they had rejected with scorn. Her pride cried out that she could not endure mercy from him even if he wished to extend it. Surely there must be some other way out than the humiliation of begging him not to prosecute. She could see none but one, and that was infinitely worse. Yet she knew it would be her father’s first impulsive instinct to seek to fight her out of her trouble, the more because it was through him that it had fallen upon her. At all hazards she must prevent this.