Wilkinson sank into his chair and covered his face with his hands. Leslie darted around the corner of the big desk and threw her arms about him.
"I knew--I knew----" she sobbed in her joy. She pressed her young, fair face against his grizzled jowl. "My father ..." she whispered softly to him, as though to some lover, "my father, will you believe that I never really doubted you? It sounded so true on the instant----"
Wilkinson drew her to his knee and kissed her.
"I don't wonder you believed him, girlie," he said after a while. "Why shouldn't he fool you, when he fooled your old father."
The girl still clung to him, but Wilkinson felt the strain beginning to tell, felt that his face was growing ashen with fatigue, and now that it was over he needed solitude. So he placed her lightly on her feet, and tapping her affectionately on the shoulder, said:
"Run along now, girlie. And on your way out you might tell Jordan that I'm not to be disturbed for fifteen minutes--not even by that Flomerfelt, who seems to be wandering around upstairs in our private apartments. That man gets on my nerves so that I can't think."
After Leslie had gone, for some moments Wilkinson, in silence, puffed away at his black cigar. Then, with considerable deliberation, he rose, went over to the door, and locked and bolted it. Absorbed in his thoughts, he remained standing there for a long time. When he turned back toward the desk, a woman stood there, facing him--a woman, young, tall, slender, with very dark hair and dark blue eyes, a woman with a strange mixture of hope and trouble in her eyes.
Wilkinson's face paled; he was angry through and through. Nevertheless he struggled to appear calm.
"Confound it, Madeline," he said tactfully, "I forgot all about you. This blamed excitement put it all out of my head." But in the next breath his manner changed, and he burst out with: "What the deuce is your car doing at my door?"
"Your car, not mine," she reminded him gently.
"It happens to be yours," he corrected, "for I gave it to you, didn't I?"
"We won't go into that," wearily she replied.
"We'll cut out the question of ownership. What's more to the point, is, what the devil you're doing in my house? If you wanted to see me, why didn't you wait for me to come to you? My wife is upstairs," he went on severely, "and my daughter all around the place. They probably both know you, even though they don't know.... You might have waited----"