Her face still was white.

Her eyes were still on the verge of fear, and as the steps came nearer he brushed back the warm masses of her hair and whispered for the twentieth time, as if the words must convince her: "I love you!" He slipped an arm about her waist, and Josephine's fingers nervously caught his hand.
Then the door was flung open.

Philip knew that it was the master of Adare House who stood on the threshold--a great, fur-capped giant of a man who seemed to stoop to enter, and in whose eyes as they met Philip's there was a wild and half-savage inquiry.

Such a man Philip had not expected to see; awesome in his bulk, a Thorlike god of the forests, gray-bearded, deep-chested, with shaggy hair falling out from under his cap, and in whose eyes there was the glare which Philip understood and which he met unflinchingly.
For a moment he felt Josephine's fingers grip tighter about his own; then with a low cry she broke from him, and John Adare opened his arms to her and crushed his bearded face down to hers as her arms encircled his neck.

In the gloom of the hall beyond them there appeared for an instant the thin, dark face of Jean Jacques Croisset.