"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. It was but little wonder that, witnessing the burst of rage with which Wilkinson had told him of the Governor's refusal to pardon, not to speak of the pitiful state of collapse in which he found Leslie, that thwarted and disappointed as he was, Colonel Morehead came to feel that there was little likelihood of anything being immediately done towards the forming of a new campaign. Practically, the Wilkinson advisory committee had dwindled down to three--a triumvirate now, as it were--for Flomerfelt, doubtless for reasons of his own, had returned to New York; and Morehead at once set himself the task of forcing the intellects of father and daughter to resume their functions. With the girl it did not prove difficult. Womanlike, and despite her horror of the inevitable, she flung aside her own personal troubles at the call of the Colonel for a consultation, and entered the conclave intent on helping her father in his last great struggle with an energy that she determined would be boundless.