"Looks like it," laconically returned the squire, who instantly began to recover himself, while his eyes glittered like points of polished steel. "Perhaps you'll be wanting to buy another ticket for New York, now that you know I'm around, eh?"
"No, I'll be ---- if I will!" fiercely retorted the other, in a low, angry tone. Then he elbowed his way by his enemy, and disappeared among the crowd.
The squire chuckled viciously to himself, his irritation against Clifford forgotten for the moment in his new and rather startling encounter.
"Ha, ha! Bill. You're afraid of me, and you can't conceal the fact. And you have even more cause than you dream of," he muttered, a cruel smile wreathing his lips. "I wonder what you are doing here in Washington--I'll bet you're trying to lobby some devilish scheme or other, for your own private interests. But I think there'll be a day of reckoning between you and me before you're much older."
A little later Mollie and Gertrude Athol slipped away from the company and went for a stroll through the fine conservatory that led from the south side of the house. They wandered about, chatting socially, for a time, until Gertrude, chancing to glance up, saw her father standing in the doorway beckoning to her.
"Papa wants me," she said. "I expect he wishes to introduce me to some friends of whom he told me to-day. I am sorry to leave you, Miss Heatherford, but you will come to see me soon, will you not? and then we will plan to meet often. Good night, if I should not see you again."
She tripped away, but Mollie, who was a dear lover of flowers, lingered in that bower of beauty to examine some rare and exquisite orchids which were in full bloom. Suddenly, as she rounded a corner at the extreme end of the conservatory, some one started up from a seat that was half-concealed by some palms and foliage plants, and she found herself confronted by Philip Wentworth.
She had not dreamed of his being in the house, for she had seen none of the family that evening, and, in truth, he had been there but a few minutes, having had another engagement, but had promised to join his fiancée, Gertrude Athol, before the evening was over. He had been looking for her--had come to the conservatory to seek her, entering by a door leading from the dining room, instead of the hall, when, seeing the two girls, and not wishing to meet them together, he had sought the seat referred to, and concealed himself among the foliage until they should return to the house.