"What it signifies," he answered, picking up the paper, "may depend on you."
Flomerfelt's eyes narrowed. Then, with a lithe and dexterous movement of his long arms, he shot his cuffs--hitherto out of sight--into view; extending them, with a jerk, below his coat-sleeves, so that they covered his lean wrists to the extent of three-quarters of an inch, a distance which he measured with mathematical certainty, apparently, for his nice adjustment of them was followed critically by his glance. He eyed and adjusted one cuff until it satisfied him, and then eyed and adjusted the other; finally he rubbed his hands together, and said:
"One of the richest women in the world--rich in her own right. How does that sound to you?"
"It's a possibility that affects a woman in this house."
"I? I'm not rich. I've been a fool!" she cried. "I should have made him settle something on me--half, at any rate. Now it's all gone; he's lost everything; I might as well have had half of it--as well that, as to throw it in the gutter as he did."
Wilkinson's confidential man seated himself.
"Unquestionably you need me," he said frankly, and then stopped. Hitherto he had kept his own counsel. And yet, he reflected, there is a wisdom of disclosure just as there is a wisdom of suppression. Some new impulse seized him; his voice sank into a whisper. "There is a chance for us, Mrs. Peter V., to be rich, if we work together, unusually rich."
"But how?" she whispered back, excitedly.
Flomerfelt smiled inscrutably, and answered:
"A good chance?" she interrupted eagerly.
"There's only one man who can prevent it," he went on.
Immediately then she went back to first principles.
"What is going to happen to him? Will they put him in jail?"
"I've often wondered," he mused, "whether it would be good or bad for us if they jailed him. A man in prison is a man very much out of the way. But in this case he would be too much out of the way. Put him in jail and you discourage his defence--you encourage the public, his depositors. They'll do what we should do: infest the wreck and gobble up what is ours by right. No, so long as Peter Wilkinson lives, we must fight his battle for him--pull him through, keep him standing up, only to be able to knock him down later. That, so long as he lives, must be our policy. So long as he lives," he repeated.