"I know," he began emphatically, "I know that Peter V. Wilkinson is still worth from fifty to a hundred million dollars--money sucked like life-blood from the populace. I know that and more--his entire fortune stands, in a manner and by a method that no one ever will suspect, in your name. Your name, of course--whom else could he trust? Surely not his second wife, with all that money? You know that well enough." "Mr. Ilingsworth, I----" "And because you had these millions," went on Ilingsworth hurriedly, excitedly, "among them my quarter of a million, not mine, but Elinor's,--do you know what that means to her?" Leslie was strangely affected. She felt her consciousness vacillating between a sense of danger and a sense of pity. Surreptitiously, during the first part of the interview, she had pressed the button for assistance, and had discovered, later, the disconnection of the wires. Just what to do she did not know. Above all, she realised that she must propitiate this man--this man with the grievance, real or fancied, whose statements, if true, gave her the desire to hear more; if untrue, rendered him all the more a man of danger. Impulsively she held out her hand, and said softly: "Do tell me about your daughter--Elinor--Mr. Ilingsworth." Immediately Ilingsworth dropped his air of aggressiveness. He advanced slowly toward her, his right hand still in his coat-pocket, but, as he approached her, he drew forth that hand, and with it, a small photograph. "That's Elinor,"--he said, his face lighting up wonderfully,--"as she was about a year ago--about the time I met your father. If I had known that you existed, I should have wished that she could know you." Leslie took the picture from his hand and looked long and intently at it. To her surprise she saw that this was no ordinary face. The girl was evidently petite, with an expression on her face that seemed to ask for the world's fond protection as well as its admiration; a girl with her soul in her eyes, at any rate, so it seemed to Leslie. "Oh, she's pretty!" she exclaimed. "But someone must always take care of her--always, always." "You've said it, though I never even thought it!" he cried. "And you, a stranger, see it--that appeal for protection, that wistfulness, that----" Abruptly he stopped and glanced quickly toward the heavy hangings on the wall toward the right--a strange, startled glance it was. Leslie followed the direction of his gaze wonderingly. "I had a feeling, somehow," he said, fastening his steely grey eyes suspiciously on her, "that we were not alone." And indeed Ilingsworth would have been all the more startled had he known that his fancy embodied the truth. For behind the dull red curtains breathed a mortal who had heard, had seen, everything. II