And yet as his mind followed
the thread of her story, and leaped ahead and vaguely glimpsed what was
to come, he was conscious in a sort of premonitory way of a vaster peril
than any he had ever known, as though forces, for the moment masked,
were arrayed against him whose strength and whose malignity were beyond
human parallel. In what a strange, almost incoherent way his brain was
working! He roused himself a little and looked around him--and, with a
shock, the starkness of the room, the abject, pitiful air of destitution
brought home to him with terrific, startling force the significance of
the scene in which he was playing a part. His face set suddenly in
hard lines. That she should have been brought to assume such a life as
this--forced out of her environment of wealth and refinement, forced
in her purity to rub shoulders with the vile, the dissolute, forced to
exist as such a creature amid the crime and vice, the wretched horror
of the underworld that swirled around her! There was anger now upon him,
burning, hot--a merciless craving that was a savage, hungry lust for
vengeance.
And then she was speaking again:
"Father's death occurred very shortly after my uncle's message advising
us to postpone our trip was received. On his death, Travers, very
naturally, as father's lawyer, cabled my uncle to come to New York
at once; and my uncle replied, saying that he was coming by the first
steamer.
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