Henrietta thought her companion somewhat abstracted on their way down town, and unusually serious, even for him, who was accustomed to take, as she had already learned, a serious view of himself and the world. He crossed the ferry with her, and not until they had ensconced themselves in a quiet corner of the boat's upper deck did he seem to settle the question which had been disturbing his mind. But settled she decided it must be, for he now gave himself up to enjoyment of her society.

When they landed he walked with her to her trolley car, where they stood, still talking, until the motorman began making preparations to start.

"Good-bye," he said unsmilingly, as he held out his hand. "I shall see you again sometime, but I fear it will not be soon."



CHAPTER XIV

"THERE IS NOT ROOM FOR US BOTH"

"What shall I do?" Henrietta Marne exclaimed aloud as she looked despairingly at the papers that littered her desk. "Here are half a dozen letters, this morning, that ought to have his immediate attention, to say nothing of all the others that I've got stacked away in this drawer. Well, I'll just have to keep on as I've done before and answer them in my own name, saying that Mr. Brand is temporarily out of the city and as soon as he returns, etc. If he doesn't come back soon," she grumbled on as she seated herself at the typewriter, "I'll be as hysterical as Mildred is, though I'm not in love with him."

She did what she could with the morning's mail, looking at one envelope as she carefully put it away unopened, with more than a little interest and curiosity, as she saw on its upper corner the firm name of "Gordon and Rotherley." After she had finished the letter writing she busied herself for an hour with such duties as it was possible for her to take up.

The architect's suite of offices was on an upper floor of a high building and from its windows one's vision soared far over the city southward and westward. Henrietta paused now and then in the course of her work to forget her anxieties in the sights and thoughts that greeted her in that wide view. Down below, at the bottom of the street canyons, people and vehicles were rushing back and forth.

But her eyes never rested long upon them. Rather, they traveled slowly out over the mighty plain of roofs, broken by chimneys and spires, by great, square buttes of buildings, by domes, turrets and towers, across the bay, gleaming silver-white or glowing copper-red in the sun, on to where the swelling hills of Staten Island loomed dimly against the horizon.

In the brilliant sunshine a thousand plumes of cloud-white steam waved gaily above the castellated plain of roofs and shook out their tendrils in the breeze. "Peace pipes" Henrietta sometimes called them to herself, as she thought of all that their fragile beauty, forever dissolving and forever being renewed, meant to the city beneath them. She liked to think of them, as she watched them curling and waving upward toward the blue, as a sign and compact of earth's peace and good-will.

Her bent of mind was much more practical than imaginative, but she could never look out over this scene without feeling her nerves thrill with vague consciousness of the titanic energies ceaselessly grinding, striving, achieving, beneath that surface of roofs and towers. And now, as always when she stopped to gaze from her window for a few moments, she felt her own pulses quicken in response and her own inward being stir, as if those waving white plumes were trumpet calls to activity.

She turned from the window, more restless than before, impatient with the necessity of merely sitting there and waiting. In Brand's private room the books she had got for him three weeks before still lay ranged upon his desk, in readiness for his return at any moment. In her spare hours she had been reading some of them herself and now she went to get one as the best way in which to put in her time. As she brought it back to her own room her thoughts, as they did a hundred times a day, hovered over and around her various speculations concerning the mystery of her employer's absence.

"I wonder," they presently ran, "if it could be possible that he is hiding somewhere in the city just to indulge in some sort of orgy." And this time denial of such a possibility did not, as formerly, spring up spontaneously in her mind. "I don't like to think he could be that sort of a man," she temporized with her budding doubt, "for he always seems so refined and thoroughly nice, and he's always been such a perfect gentleman to me. But it's evident that Mr. Gordon, who knows him so well, hasn't a very high opinion of him, except in his art."

The telephone broke in upon her musing, and as she put the receiver to her ear and said "hello" she was almost as much astonished as delighted to hear in reply the voice of Felix Brand himself. He told her that he had just got home, after another beastly trip into the back woods of West Virginia, where he had had an accident. He had slipped and sprained his ankle—no, it was nothing serious, and was all right now, but it had kept him a prisoner for nearly two weeks in a mountain cabin a thousand miles from anywhere, and he would be at the office as soon as he had had his luncheon.

Glad as she was that he was there once more to take up the matters that needed his attention so badly, Henrietta was almost afraid to face him, when she heard his voice in the outer room, lest there might be that in his appearance which would give form and force to the doubts that were stirring in her mind.

But he seemed no different from his usual, affable and well-dressed self. He wore, in all seasons, very dark or black clothing, which was always in perfect condition, and fitted his well-proportioned figure trimly and closely rather than with the looser English cut. His dark eyes looked down upon her with their usual caressing smile and his clean-shaven face, with its finely modeled, regular features, was as handsome, as refined, as ever.

But, no,—his secretary was conscious of something in its expression she had never noticed there before. What with the rejoicing that filled her heart and the work that kept her hands and brain busy all the rest of the day, she had not time to think what it was, or to give it any definite form in her thoughts, until her homeward trip by subway, ferry and trolley gave her leisure to scan closely the happenings of the afternoon.

Even then she merely said to herself that there was something in his face and eyes that did not seem quite like him, something that was not so "nice" as he had always seemed to be. She did not know enough about the evil undercurrents of life to give the thing more specific definition. But she did know that, whatever it was, it stirred, deep within her, a faint sense of repulsion.

"Did you get my letter?" was one of the first things he said to her.

"No, Mr. Brand, I've heard nothing at all from you since you left."

"You didn't? That's queer. I gave it to the porter to mail and he probably forgot all about it. I went away so hurriedly I didn't have time to write until after I got aboard the train. There were some directions in it about the work here. Well, we'll have to go back and take things up where we left off. And the first thing is that letter I wrote and asked you not to send. Where is it?"

"Oh, I ventured to mail that—I knew how important it was, and I found out enough about the business to feel sure you would want me to."

"You did! How fortunate!"

"Then it was all right? I am so glad! But I don't deserve all the credit. Your friend, Mr. Hugh Gordon, was here——"

"What! That fellow? Did he dare to come here?"

The start, the sudden turn, the sharp exclamation with which Brand broke into her sentence were so different from his habitual manner of deliberate movement and courteous speech that Henrietta gazed at him in amazement. Surprise and indignation sat upon his countenance.

"Why, yes," she faltered. "He was here several times. The first time, a few days after you left, he told me he knew you wanted that letter sent."

She went on to repeat what Gordon had told her and ended with: "Of course, I didn't take his word for it entirely, but after what he told me I was able to find out enough to make me feel sure it was the right thing to do."

"You did quite right," he told her cordially. "But I am surprised to learn of his doing, for me, a friendly act like that. You said he was here afterwards?"

"Yes, several times. He came to tell me that you were quite safe and well and would return before long. I was very glad to have the assurance, for, of course, I couldn't help being anxious."

He opened his mouth as if to speak, closed it again suddenly, then, as he busied his hands with some papers on his desk, took sudden resolution and, though his face paled, said in a casual way:

"Did he tell you where I was?"

"He said he didn't know where you were, but that he did know positively that if anything should happen to you he would be the first person to know anything about it. I felt so much less anxious after that."

"Yes, it was quite true, what he said," Brand assented slowly. He hesitated again, as if on the verge of farther speech, and Henrietta waited. After a moment he turned to her a face out of which he seemed purposely to have forced all expression and asked:

"How did he impress you? Do you think he looks like me? Some people say he does."

"Oh, he impressed me very favorably, indeed. He seemed so sincere and so kind and so much in earnest. No, I didn't think he looked like you, except in a general way. His features, perhaps, are something like yours, but he himself is so different, his manner, his expression—everything."

She spoke interestedly, the color rising in her cheeks, and Brand watched her narrowly. "Oh, that reminds me," she exclaimed, "there's a letter for you from him. It's in my desk."

She went to get it and as her employer's gaze followed her his eyes widened and his face grew ashen. "My God!" he muttered, and there was consternation in his whispered tone. Then sudden anger flashed over him. Henrietta felt it quivering in his tones as he said, when she gave him the envelope:

"Thank you, Miss Marne. You did just right about mailing that letter, and I am much pleased that you did. But hereafter don't trust that fellow Gordon in any way. For all his pretense of friendship, he is the worst enemy I have and would stop at nothing to injure me. Hereafter he must not be allowed to enter these rooms. Will you please tell the boy that these are my orders—that Hugh Gordon must be put out at once if he attempts to come inside my door again."

Henrietta noticed that the architect took the letter she gave him with a hand that trembled slightly, cast at it a single frowning, hostile glance and hastily but carefully put it away in his breast pocket. She remembered that just so had he looked at the previous letter from Gordon, and with just the same angry care had put it away unopened.

In that inner pocket it remained untouched, just as had the former one, by turns searing his very heart with impotent anger and chilling it with fear, until a late hour of the night, when he sat alone before his library fire. Then, at last, with the look and manner of a man forced to touch a loathed object, he took it out and opened it.

"Felix Brand, I have come to a decision," the letter abruptly began. "It must be either you or I. Until lately I thought there might be room for us both. But there isn't. If you had paid any attention to what I told you before, had shown any remorse for the evil you have done, or any intention of reforming your conduct, I might have come to a different conclusion. I will say more than that. If you had felt in your soul the desire to get yourself together and be a real man instead of a source of pollution, and had shown in your thoughts and actions the willingness and the ability to try to make yourself over, I would have recognized your right to live.

"In that case, I would have gone, perhaps not willingly, but feeling it right to go, back to where I came from, and I would have let you alone. At least, I would have tried to do that, because I give you full credit for your genius, of which I have none, and know its value to the world. But I might not have succeeded. For I have tasted life and found it good and the desire to live, the will to live, is so strong within me that it might have been stronger than the sense of my duty, of your right, or anything else.

"But it is useless to speculate about that, because you grow worse instead of better. You are like one of those people who, apparently unharmed themselves, carry about with them the germs of typhoid and scatter destruction wherever they go. The sooner the world is rid of you the better for it, and the better for you, too.

"You will be surprised, and probably angry, to hear from your secretary that I have visited your office. I went, primarily, because I wanted to meet Miss Marne, but also because I knew she ought to mail that letter and, finally, because I wanted to reassure her about your absence and prevent any measures being taken to search for you. The first reason is none of your affair and on the other two counts you ought to be grateful to me, though I don't suppose you will be. I took some trouble to find out about the matters on which that letter bore, because I knew how important you considered them. You may find it difficult to believe, but it is true that, although I despise and loathe you, I did not wish to be responsible for such smash-up of your plans as longer delay in the sending of your letter would have caused. The bond between us is too close, Felix Brand, for me not to feel compassion for you sometimes.

"I could have kept you away longer this time if I had not felt sorry for Miss Annister. It was on her account that I let you return when I did. Don't make her suffer that way again. If you don't give her beforehand some sort of plausible preparation for your next absence—for there will be another, and that before long—I shall enable her father to find out some plain truths about you that may complicate matters for you in that quarter.

"My mind is made up, Felix Brand. There is not room in the world for both you and me. I shall try not to hurt you publicly again, because it does no good. And efficient measures are the only ones that appeal to me. But I am going to do my best to push you off the edge for good and all. I have doubted and hesitated and argued the matter over and over with myself and tried to see some way of compromise. But you will not come my way and I loathe yours. And you know quite well that you yourself are responsible for the whole business, even for the fate that awaits you. You will merely suffer the consequences of your own actions. For I believe I shall win. I know that you will put up a good fight, for we have fought before, and, so far, you have won oftener than I have. But in the end, I shall win. I dare say you will think it impertinent in me to add that I am convinced it will be for your good, as well as for the world's benefit, that I should win. Nevertheless, I do think that very thing and so I can still declare myself,

"Yours sincerely, "HUGH GORDON."

Felix Brand read this letter with an interest that made him, in spite of his abhorrence, go through it a second time before he lifted his eyes from its pages. For him its mysterious threats needed no explanation and as he sensed the full meaning of the fate it predicted, angry horror swept over him.

He shuddered as he glanced apprehensively about him, as though fearing to see take shape out of the air the intangible force with which, on that other night three weeks before, he had fought to the utmost of his strength, only to be overcome at last. The memory of that fierce struggle was upon him now, chilling his veins and clutching his heart with terror. And he would have to fight that invisible, relentless power over and over again to save himself from the black-magic destiny that threatened. Then, suddenly, fear and horror were swept away by a frenzy of rage that ramped through him all the more fiercely because there was nothing upon which it could wreak itself.

"You thief!" he cried, glaring about him with bloodshot eyes. "You hypocrite, to set yourself up as better than I am! Do you hear me? You hypocrite, thief, murderer!"

The exaltation of his anger gave him fresh strength and new confidence in himself and he tore the letter into bits and ground them beneath his heel as he shouted:

"This is what will happen to you! It's what you deserve and what you'll get, you damned thief!"



CHAPTER XV

FELIX BRAND HAS A BAD QUARTER OF AN HOUR

It was evident to Dr. Annister that Felix Brand was having a bad quarter of an hour. But the little physician, sitting upright in his capacious chair, his elbows on its arms and his finger-tips resting against one another, could not find it in his heart to abate in the least the penetrating gaze of his gray eyes or the gentle insistence of his questions. For the longer their talk continued the more he became convinced that the man before him was not speaking the truth and the more he felt it necessary, for his daughter's sake, to find out what was the truth.

"I am sorry to have to tell you, Felix," said Dr. Annister, in the beginning of their conversation, "that I am unable to feel entire confidence in your explanation of your long and mysterious absence."

The architect hesitated for a bare instant before he turned to reply. The other noted that he had to stop to think, that neither movement nor answer was spontaneous.

"Do you mean me to understand, Dr. Annister," he said courteously, "that you think I am lying?"

"Let's not put it just that way. Suppose we call it the endeavor on your part to conceal something you don't want known—the instinct of self-defense. Morally, doubtless, it is the same thing. But I am not concerned just now with the moral nature of the thing itself. I am much concerned, however, for Mildred's sake, with the nature of the thing behind it."

Brand shot a quick, uneasy glance at him and moved restlessly in his chair. But there was no change in the customary, soft modulations of his voice or the urbanity of his manner as he replied: "Pardon me, Dr. Annister, but you are taking for granted something you have no right to assume. You know that I am an honorable man, accustomed to show at least ordinary regard for the truth. And therefore I say that you have no right to doubt my word on mere suspicion."

"My suspicion, if you wish to call it so, is well enough grounded to deserve, on my part, the most careful attention and, on yours, entire respect. Your explanation seems to me to be so thin and full of holes as not to be worth a moment's notice. It would be puerile for me to tell you how many opportunities you would have had on the train, as you were leaving the railroad, when you returned to it, and on your way home, to write or to telegraph to me, to Mildred, or to Miss Marne, and give us some idea of your whereabouts and assurance of your safety."

"I did write, on the train, to Mildred and also to Miss Marne. Apparently, the letters were lost in the mails or the porter forgot to post them."

Dr. Annister's finger-tips patted one another softly while his eyes searched the patrician face of his companion and marked in it signs of uneasiness.

"I have always supposed," he said quietly, "that a telegraph line runs beside the railroad into West Virginia, and I have not heard that the wires were down during your absence."

Felix Brand rose and with hands thrust into his pockets moved uncertainly from one chair to another. "Mildred has entire confidence in my explanation," he said with a touch of defiance in his voice. "She knows I would not deceive her."

"Mildred is young," her father replied gently, "and ignorant of the evil of which there is such a plenty in the world. She is very, very much in love with her promised husband and if he told her that black is white the dazzle in her eyes would make her see it white. But, Felix, it is just because she is so young, so innocent and so much at the mercy of her loving heart that I must speak plainly to you. I don't expect you to be entirely worthy of such a wealth of pure young love as she gives you. The man doesn't live who is clean enough in heart and in life to be worthy of such a treasure. But I do expect you to be, Felix, and I must assure myself that you are, clean enough and honorable enough not to blight all the rest of her life. What is past is past, but from now on there must be nothing that will not bear the light of day."

Brand was moving slowly back and forth, his countenance expressive of inward debate and hesitation. He was asking himself if it would not be the wisest plan to lay his trouble frankly before the physician and ask for his help. But his pride and his confidence in himself drew back from such a step.

No, he told himself, nobody must know. It must be kept in the darkest secrecy—suppose the thing should get out, and into the papers! His heart quaked at the thought. And he could not feel sure what view Dr. Annister would take of the truth—he might forbid the marriage with Mildred. No, he would keep the truth locked in his own breast and fight his battle alone. Well, he was sure of winning. It might take a little time, but he had no doubt of the outcome. Nevertheless, there was some uncertainty in his manner, though his courteous tones were firm enough as he said:

"If you will not take my word—and permit me to say, Dr. Annister, that it has never been doubted before—what more can I say?"

"You can tell me the truth, Felix," bluntly replied his prospective father-in-law. "I am fond of you, my boy, very fond of you,—I think you know that. I am proud of your genius and I expect to see you become one of the most famous architects of our time. More than anything else in the world I want to see my little girl as happy, as your wife, as her love deserves she should be. But I must tell you frankly, Felix, that I am afraid. I am afraid for you and your future and very much afraid for that of my daughter with you. That's why I feel I must speak as plainly as I am going to. I wish you would make it easier for me by meeting me half way."

The architect, still moving about the room with slow restlessness, stopped short and cast a quick, suspicious glance at the physician. The sweat broke out on his forehead as the fear leaped into his heart that Dr. Annister had guessed the truth. He had to grope among his panic thoughts for a moment before he could reply. His voice was a little strained as he said:

"Meet you half way? I don't know what you mean?"

Dr. Annister leaned back in his chair and sighed. But his searching gray eyes did not leave the other's face nor fail to take note there of the frequent signs of inner perturbation. Sadly he was saying to himself that everything in Brand's expression and manner increased his fears and justified his suspicion.

"Well, then," he said, "let us come straight to the point. A look, an expression, a tell-tale sign that I don't like has been steadily growing stronger in your face for the last six months. For the physician, and especially for the one who deals as much as I do with the psychological results of misliving, a man's countenance becomes a veritable table of contents for the book of his life. And your face is beginning to tell me such a story of self-indulgence and sensuality as makes me unwilling to give my daughter to your arms."

Brand turned a little away, as if he would conceal the traitor face whose refined beauty this inquisitor was finding even less than skin deep. "Of course," he said, "I am not as innocent as I was a dozen years ago. But—what you would have, Dr. Annister? A saint? You know you would have to look far to find one among modern young men. I'm no worse than the most of them and much better than some."

The physician was leaning forward again in his chair, his finger-tips tapping. He paid no attention to his companion's defense but pursued his own line of thought with an increasing tensity in his voice.

"I have been watching that revealing table of contents in your face grow steadily plainer for the last six months. After each of these long absences, for which you can give no satisfactory explanation, the expression has become, to my eyes, stronger and more significant than before. It forces me to the hypothesis, almost to the conclusion, that you have been spending this time somewhere in the under-world, in some sort of secret debauch."

Brand wiped the starting beads of sweat from his brow, and said, "I don't believe you really think me that sort of man, Dr. Annister!"

"Or, possibly," the physician continued, "that you have become a victim to the alcohol or one of the drug habits. I don't see the signs of that sort of thing upon you, yet. But—well, if such is your misfortune, I wish, Felix, that you would confide in me. Such habits are curable and even if my other hypothesis, which your physical appearance has forced me to, should be true we might be able to find its cause in some nerve lesion susceptible of remedy. In either case, you know as well as I do, Felix, that there is disaster before you, physical, moral and mental, if you keep on. Make a clean breast of it, and I'll do my best to help you."

Again the temptation was assailing the architect's mind to accept this proffered help and shift his burden to the shoulders of this little but puissant man of healing. Perhaps those tapping fingers could make him whole again. But as he faced avowal of the truth his whole soul drew back. It was impossible—the one thing he could not do. Then came another idea, perhaps a way out.

"Suppose—I do not admit it, but suppose, for the sake of your argument, that your hypothesis should be true. What then—Mildred—what about——"

Dr. Annister sprang to his feet and broke in upon the other's stumbling words in a voice whose low-toned intensity gave his listener an uncomfortable thrill: "Nothing could make me happier than to see my child the happy wife of the man she loves, if he deserves her love. But I'd rather see her dead than married to a man of gross and unclean life, who has made himself a slave to seasons of secret debauch!"

There was silence for a moment while Brand looked away, unwilling to meet the physician's eyes. His face was pale and he breathed as if there were a weight upon his chest. Again he was considering open confession. But when he spoke he said:

"Dr. Annister, you are most unjust. I told you the truth about my absence. On that question there is nothing more to be said. But it is my right to know, and I insist upon knowing, whether or not you have any basis whatever for these insinuations you have been making, except your own suspicions."

Mildred's father gazed thoughtfully at her betrothed for a moment before he replied. He was saying to himself that the man's words were candid enough in their import, but that, somehow, the speech had not rung true. There was no spark of indignation in those brown eyes, that seemed to have some difficulty in meeting his. Nor was there any quiver of that honest resentfulness he longed to see. Beneath Brand's habitual manner of slightly ceremonious politeness and deference he discerned uncertainty of thought and purpose.

"There's something wrong here," the physician was thinking, "something woefully wrong. He doesn't seem to feel the monstrosity of what I've almost been charging him with." Unconsciously he shook his head sadly as he began to speak aloud:

"As I told you before, Felix, with the knowledge I have spent a lifetime of hard work gaining, I don't need any better evidence than my own eyes can give. I consider it as worthy of confidence as any information I might have from another. That and my own intelligence are the sole ground of my fears. These did have, however, some slight corroboration in the rather mysterious manner and assurances of your friend, Mr. Hugh Gordon."

At the sound of that name Brand faced sharply round upon the astonished doctor, anger flaming in his face and eyes.

"That man!" he cried. "Are you taking his word against mine? He is my worst enemy, and he will stop at nothing to injure me. He is a thief, a murderer, or would be if he dared. I demand that you tell me what he has been charging me with!"

Dr. Annister stared in amazement at this flare of hostility and wrath. "You mistake me, Felix," he said quietly, although inwardly he was wondering much as to the cause of the outburst. "I did not say he charged you with anything, nor did he. On the contrary, he seemed to me to be doing his best to execute a friendly office toward you. I thought it strange that he should be so positive you were in no danger of any sort and yet should not know where you were. He seemed sincere and straightforward and the only hypothesis upon which I could reconcile his two statements was one that strengthened what you call my suspicions."

While the doctor spoke Brand had been moving about with quick steps and sharp turns, scowling and muttering. "Oh, I know the fellow goes about making this pretense of friendship," he said sullenly, "but there's no trust to be put in him. He is bent on my ruin. But I'll get even with him, I'll down him yet!"

He took another turn or two, apparently endeavoring to get himself under control again, while Dr. Annister regarded him with gray brows wrinkled thoughtfully. He began to feel, uneasily, that there was more underneath this situation than he had guessed.

"Well, Felix," he said at last, "I am sorry that our conversation has had no better result. I hoped you would clear this matter up and, if you need help, would let me give you whatever advice and aid I could. Think the matter over more carefully and if you should see it in a different light come to me at any time and let me see what I can do for you."

"I thank you, Dr. Annister. I shall keep your kindness in mind, although I do not suppose I shall have any more occasion to make use of it in the future than I have now. But Mildred—" he hesitated as he turned an anxious countenance upon his companion. "You are not going to forbid our marriage on account of these baseless and unjust notions of yours?"

Down in his heart Dr. Annister was at that moment deciding that his daughter should never become this man's wife unless all his apprehensions and fears were first cleared away. But he feared the effect upon Mildred, especially at this juncture, of a forced breaking of the engagement. So he temporized.

"No, I shall not forbid it, or at least, not now. But I can not consent to a marriage in the early future, as you have both begged me to do. You will have to wait a while longer, Felix, and prove yourself worthy. I don't like these mysterious disappearances."

After Brand had gone the little doctor dropped down into his favorite arm-chair in his usual attitude of profound thought. "Poor Mildred! Poor little girl!" he was thinking. "I guess her mother had better take her abroad this summer and let us see if change and travel and absence won't have some effect on her devotion. It would be awfully lonely for me here, Mildred would be wretchedly unhappy and Margaret would have a devil of a time. Still, the experiment will be worth trying."



CHAPTER XVI

MRS. FENLOW IS ANGRY

"Harry, dear, do please conceal the newspaper in your handbag and carry it off with you," said Isabella Marne as her sister entered the dining room. The sun shone in upon a window full of blooming plants, a bowl of daffodils glowed upon the table and the whole room looked as cheerful and buoyant, as dainty and pleasing as did the little lady in a pink and white muslin gown who was putting the last touches to the breakfast table. "Mother is coming down this morning," she went on, "and I don't want her to see it."

"O, dear!" exclaimed Henrietta as she glanced at the head lines. "No, indeed, mother mustn't see this. It would worry her too much. Have you read it, Bella? Was he hurt?"

"The account says Mr. Brand wasn't hurt at all. But some of the others were—one rather badly, and Miss Andrews had her scalp cut. I hope it won't spoil her beauty."

"It must have been a narrow escape for them all," Henrietta commented in shocked tones as she glanced down the column. "Poor Mildred! She will be wild with anxiety and jealousy! You know, Bella, she can't bear for another woman to have a smile from him, or a little attention of any sort."

"Sh-h-h! Mother's coming! Do hide the paper quick and please talk real fast all through breakfast, so she won't think to ask for it until after you're gone. Mother would never, never let me go out with him in his auto again if she knew about this accident."

"I don't think you ought to, anyway, Bella. I wish you wouldn't."

"What harm does it do? And it gives me a little fun—about all I ever have, you know. Delia is having another season of introspection," she went on laughingly as Mrs. Marne entered the room and all three seated themselves at the table. "It has lasted two days already and I'm trembling with anxiety as to what will happen next. She was in such a brown study this morning that she would have sugared the eggs and salted the coffee if I hadn't been on the watch."

"Do you think she's making up her mind again to leave us?" said Mrs. Marne apprehensively.

"Oh, Delia's all right, except when she gets uneasy about the scarcity of matrimonial chances in this neighborhood. She doesn't really want to marry, at least not now, but she likes to think she could if she wanted to and she likes to see a new man once in a while, as she says, 'to pass a word with.' And I sympathize with her, even if I do have three letters a week from Warren."

"Bella!" exclaimed her mother, but with more amusement than reproof in her voice.

"You would, too, if you were twenty-five years younger," said Bella, leaning over to pat her mother's arm affectionately. "Anyway, I prove my sympathy with Delia by bringing to her all the stray crumbs of comfort I can find. I haven't told her yet—I'm waiting for her fit of introspection to reach the acute stage—but the grocer has got a new delivery boy, a nice young man, good-looking and polite. I wish somebody would be that kind to me!" she laughed, with a whimsical pout of her pretty lips. "Harry, if Mr. Brand says anything to you today about coming over here in his motor-car—" Henrietta looked up with a disapproving lift of her eyebrows and saw a sparkle of defiant mischief dancing in her sister's blue eyes—"just tell him, please," Bella proceeded with a toss of her head, "that my physician has ordered me to take an auto ride today as the only means of saving my life!"

It was mid-April and the very air thrilled with the hurry and promise of the spring that was making ready to leap at a single bound—would it be tomorrow, in three days, next week?—from swelling bud and bronzing tree into full flower and leafage. As Henrietta hastened down the street beneath budding trees busy at their yearly miracle and past little green lawns with their beds of crocuses and snowdrops and tulips, the splendid caressing sunshine bathed her in its gaiety, the smell of freshly turned earth challenged her to buoyant mood and the singing and fluttering and twittering of birds called her to equal delight in the radiant season. But all was not well with her world and she was more conscious of the anxiety in her heart than of the call of the spring that was storming at her senses.

True, she could begin to look forward now with reasonable surety, she told herself, to the last payment, in a very few months, upon their cottage with its little lawn and garden, and that would make sure, whatever might happen, a home for her mother. Bella would probably marry within a year the young physician to whom she had been engaged so long. They had waited for his graduation from the medical school of Harvard and now he wanted to be sure of a good enough practice to feel warranted in marrying. The delay had been necessary, too, on Bella's part, for her help in the care of their mother had been indispensable. But their improving financial prospects had acted like a magic draught upon Mrs. Marne and now, as she felt more and more assured of Henrietta's ability and success, she was rapidly growing so much better and stronger that she would soon be able to take care of their housekeeping and leave Bella free to marry as soon as her fiance could offer her a home.

But Henrietta was so anxious about other things that these untangling perplexities gave her small comfort. Her sisterly caution told her it was not prudent for Isabella to go so frequently with Felix Brand in his automobile. Twice since Brand's return from his last absence had she found, when she reached home at the end of the day, that Bella had just returned from a long drive, wherein Brand's machine had apparently torn to tatters all speed laws and appeared to onlookers as a mere streak of color. After such a trip Bella's heightened spirits, Henrietta thought, made her very lovely and bewitching, with the flush in her cheeks, the sparkle in her eyes and her merry talk.

"She's young and gay-spirited and has so few pleasures," Henrietta thought, regardless of the fact that she herself was younger and had just as few, "that I feel awfully mean to object to anything that seems so innocent. But it is reckless of him to go so fast, and this accident last night—oh, I'm afraid it's dangerous. And then there's Mildred—if he was engaged to anybody else I shouldn't think anything about that; but—well, mother thinks it's all right and lovely of him to give Bella a little outing now and then; and if it wasn't I suppose he wouldn't do it."

But on this last point Henrietta was not without uneasiness. For little rifts were beginning to appear in that perfect confidence she had felt until recently in her employer. She had thought him the soul of uprightness and honor, but in his business affairs, nearly all of which passed through her hands, she knew that he had begun to make use of the barest falsehoods and to practice evasions and tricks that made her blush with shame to be the medium by which they were transmitted to paper.

Simple, sturdy forthrightness being the backbone of Henrietta's character, she could not help feeling as if she were an accomplice in his shiftiness and untruths when she typed and mailed his letters. She told herself that it was none of her affair, that she was no more than a machine in the work she did for him and that to look after her own morals was all that was incumbent upon her. Nevertheless, she was a good deal disturbed about it on this bright morning.

"He seems so different from what he was a few months ago," she thought with a sigh. "I don't understand why he should change so. I almost begin to feel like trying to find another situation. But I mustn't think about it now, for I can't afford yet to take any risks."

Her thoughts turned to another phase of Brand's character upon which also she was beginning to have doubts. She did not see many people, but a few bits of talk had reached her ears which made her wonder if the man whose character she had believed to be almost ideally fine and noble were not after all a devotee of sinister pleasures. She had begun to feel conscious, after his last return, of a feeling toward him of physical repulsion and this she knew was growing upon her. As she recalled these things her thoughts flashed uneasily back to her sister. She felt wretchedly ignorant and uncertain as to what she ought to do and wished there were some one better versed in worldly knowledge than herself to whom she could go for advice.

"I can't talk it over with mother," she thought, "because it would make her worry about it and about me, and I don't like to go to Dr. Annister, because he has enough troubles to listen to, with all those half-crazy patients of his, and Mrs. Annister admires Mr. Brand so much that she'd be offended by any suggestion that he isn't all right and—well, I don't think she's very level-headed anyway. I wish I could see Mr. Gordon again—it seems a long time. But I ought not to tell him anything about these things even if I should see him, since there seems to be so much feeling between him and Mr. Brand.

"And I'm afraid Bella wouldn't pay much attention to anything that was contrary to her own desires, anyway. I don't like the kind of influence Mr. Brand seems to be having over her. I understand it, because he used to make me feel that way myself—dissatisfied and selfish and wishful of all sorts of delightful things that I couldn't have. Well, I went through it all right, without any bad results except my own ugly feelings; and she's so dear and sweet and so happy-natured I guess she will, too, after a little."

She reached the avenue where ran the trolley line that carried her to the ferry and saw that she had just missed a car.

"Oh, dear! Isn't that provoking?" she muttered as she watched it rattling on its way. "And there isn't another one in sight yet. I hope I won't have to wait long, for I do want to get there early this morning, there's so much to do today."

Her thoughts sped on to her office and the duties that awaited her and hovered over the familiar figure of her employer at work at his desk.

"I don't see," she argued with herself, "how it can be true that he is living a bad life when he is working so hard."

She remembered how eagerly upon his return he had plunged into the work awaiting him and with what absorption he had devoted himself to it ever since. Repeatedly during the last two or three weeks he had told her that never before had he worked so rapidly and so easily and with such satisfaction in the results.

With keen pleasure and interest she was watching his design for the capitol building take form beneath his fingers, thinking it more beautiful than anything he had done before. Once she had told him, laughingly, that she believed the fairies must come in the night and touch his pencil with magic, else it would not be possible for him to put upon paper so rapidly a thing so lovely.

Only yesterday he had shown her the finished cartoon for the front elevation and with a catch of her breath she had exclaimed, "Oh, Mr. Brand, it is exquisite! I don't know why it is so beautiful, for it looks simple, but, somehow, it seems exactly right."

And he had nodded and smiled in a pleased way and said:

"Yes, that's just it—that's what I wanted to do. It's all in the proportions, and I think, for the first time in my life, I have got them just right."

As she recalled the conversation an automobile whizzed past her, slowed down and returned, and she saw Mrs. Fenlow leaning out and calling to her:

"I thought it was you, Miss Marne! Waiting for a trolley, aren't you? Well, don't wait, jump in with me. I'm going to the city and I'll take you right to your office."

Henrietta had met Mrs. Fenlow a number of times during the long-drawn-out time when the architect was endeavoring to meet her wishes with a design for the country house she had determined to build up the Hudson. She had found the elder woman's open speech and breezy manners amusing, but she had also conceived liking and respect for the sincerity and warm-heartedness that were evident underneath a rather brusque and erratic exterior.

She had been pleased and touched also by the hearty affection and comradeship between Mrs. Fenlow and her only son, Mark Fenlow, her eldest child. Henrietta had met the young man several times in her employer's office and also at his theatre party and house-warming the previous autumn. She knew that Mark had been graduated from college the previous spring and afterwards had been taken into a trust company in which his father was a stock-holder and director and that his mother, who was very proud of him, expected him to climb the ladder rapidly and become an important figure in big financial operations. Henrietta had found him a debonair youth, full of gay humor and high spirits and having, apparently, much of the same kind of good-heartedness and sincerity which she admired in his mother.

"Have you seen the morning paper?" was Mrs. Fenlow's first remark, as Henrietta settled into her seat.

"You mean the accident Mr. Brand had with his automobile? Didn't they have a fortunate escape!"

"That man has the luck of the Irish army!" declared Mrs. Fenlow.

"Did you notice that he was the only one to escape without any injury, though the cause of it was evidently his reckless driving? That's the way things always happen with him. He gets his pleasure and other people take the consequences."

Mrs. Fenlow's tone was so sharp and bitter that Henrietta looked at her in surprise. There were signs of trouble in her face, which bore also something of a war-like aspect. Dark hollows under her eyes and little lines about her mouth seemed to tell of mental anguish. But her lips were pressed together determinedly and she held her head high.

"But he can't go on like this much longer. He's bound to have a smash-up some of these fine days."

"What do you mean, Mrs. Fenlow?" queried Henrietta, wide-eyed.

Mrs. Fenlow had been speaking straight ahead of her, into the air, as if, absorbed in her own bitter thoughts, she had for the moment forgotten her companion. At the girl's question she turned with a quick movement suggestive of the swoop of a bird of prey.

"Pardon me, my dear, if I use disrespectful language about your employer. The Good Lord knows I have reason enough for it. But you needn't feel uneasy because I say it in your hearing, for I'm going to his office this very day to say the same things, and worse, to his face. When I think of the way he's used his influence over Mark—and I believed him the pink of perfection and was as pleased as an old fool over his friendship for my boy! My God!"

Her voice sank to a whisper of such fierce indignation that Henrietta shrunk a little away, staring in astonishment at her set face and quivering lips.

"Of course," she presently went on in a more natural tone, "Mark ought to have known better, he ought to have had more sense and more strength of character than to yield to that sort of temptation. But he was only a lad, and Felix Brand was old enough to know the danger there was in it for a young fellow like that. And Mark admired him so much he thought whatever Brand did must be all right."

She broke off into sudden silence and Henrietta saw her wipe a tear from the corner of her eye. The girl was so confused and embarrassed by these signs of keen emotion and hidden trouble and so ignorant of their cause that she could think of nothing that seemed well to say or do, and so she, too, remained silent until presently the elder woman turned to her again and spoke more gently.

"Don't mind me, my dear. I'm in great trouble—on Mark's account. I've had an awful blow, and I don't know yet how it will all come out. I don't want to be unjust to Felix Brand, but I can't help thinking that he's largely responsible for it. I know he was for the beginning of the whole thing. And I've found out that poor Mark's not the only one—" she was talking off into the air again, oblivious of the girl beside her—"who's paying for the consequences of Felix Brand's private pleasures. It's time he began to pay for some of them himself."

Her voice, quivering with the indignation and anguish she was trying to conceal, subsided into a muttering whose words Henrietta could not distinguish and finally she lapsed into silence. At the door of the building in which was Brand's suite of offices she said to her companion:

"I'm going up with you, my dear, if you'll let me. I want to see Mr. Brand without delay and if he isn't here yet I'll wait for him."

Miss Marne, busy at her desk with the morning's mail, heard sounds from her employer's private room during Mrs. Fenlow's call that betokened a change in the friendly relations formerly existing between them. She could hear the woman's voice raised in what seemed to be bitter denunciation and the man's replying in sneering tones. These seemed so unlike Felix Brand that she paused for a moment in her work, astonished at the unaccustomed note. During the last few weeks she had seen him several times give way to sudden temper, but even these outbursts, unprecedented though they were in her experience of him, had not seemed to her so foreign to his usual affable manner and pleasant speech as did the harsh, sarcastic antagonism of the voice in which she could hear him speaking to Mrs. Fenlow.

"But it must be Mr. Brand," thought his secretary, looking in puzzled wonder at the door into his room, "for there's surely nobody else in there."

As she gazed, held by her surprise, a letter in her hands, the wrathful voices rose again, now one, then the other, and in Mrs. Fenlow's she presently caught the words, "Hugh Gordon."

At that came the sound of the man springing to his feet, of an overturned chair rattling to the floor, of a blow upon his desk and a loud and angry oath. The girl started with a whispered exclamation of amazement and horror. Her shocked ears heard her employer denouncing both Gordon and his caller and heard the rustle of the woman's dress as she hurried across the room.

In her anger and indignation Mrs. Fenlow had rushed to the first door that met her eyes, which chanced to be the one into Henrietta's room. As she opened it she flung back over her shoulder at Brand, in a white heat of scorn and wrath:

"You whited sepulchre! I'm done with you and all my friends shall know what you are!"

She rushed past Henrietta without seeming to see her, and on through the outer room into the corridor. The door into Brand's office was left wide open and Henrietta saw him standing beside his desk, his face so distorted with passion that for a moment she doubted that it was he, and, apparently—and here again she could hardly believe her eyes—shaking his fist at his departing visitor.



CHAPTER XVII

"WHICH SHOULD HAVE THE GIFT OF LIFE?"

There was a chorus of admiration and praise from all over the country when Felix Brand's design for the capitol building was published. It was everywhere recognized as a signal achievement, far in advance of anything he had previously done, and he himself was acclaimed as one of the most promising architects of the time and the most gifted that America had yet produced. Other reproductions of his recent work, business buildings, country houses, a church and a memorial structure, were made public at about the same time and these and the capitol building aroused so much interest that newspapers and magazines published articles about him, with many illustrations of his work and criticisms of his art that praised his present accomplishment in glowing terms and prophesied he would do still greater things. In him, it was declared, had come at last a great American architect, a man of such originality, such skill and such sense of beauty and fitness that, if he continued to give such rich fulfillment of his early promise, he would soon create a distinctly American style of architecture, infused with the national spirit and expressive of the national ideals, worthy to take its place among the great architectures of the world.

His secretary collected these articles and kept them for him to see when he should return. For early in May, just before this round of praise began, when she went one morning to the office she found a letter from him saying that it had suddenly become necessary for him to go abroad at once and that, as he would be sailing in the early morning, he would have to leave affairs once more in her charge. There were some words of praise for her astuteness in the management of his business when he had been away at other times, a few directions concerning things he would like her to do or to leave undone, a brief regret that he should have to leave just now when it was most important for him to be on hand, and the hope that he would not be gone more than three or four weeks at most. But there was neither indication of where, in that large section of the world covered by "abroad," he might be reached by letter or cable, nor mention of which one of the several steamers sailing that day would bear him to his unnamed destination.

Henrietta put the letter down with a sigh of dismay. "It is too bad, too bad!" she exclaimed. "Just when everything is going nicely and he is doing wonderful work! Now things will begin to tangle up again and people will get impatient, and he will lose a lot of money. Well, I'll have to do the best I can until he comes back."

But notwithstanding her devotion to her employer's interests and the deep and genuine pleasure she felt in seeing them advance and in knowing that she was helping to put them forward—the delight of any honest worker in doing well and successfully the thing that he undertakes to do—she soon began to be conscious of a sense of relief at being rid for even a little while of Brand's physical presence. After his violent outburst against Mrs. Fenlow, Henrietta had felt her repugnance increase until it amounted to positive aversion. She did not know how great had been the nervous strain of trying constantly to suppress and ignore this feeling until she was relieved of it by his absence.

"I wonder," she said to herself on her way home a few days later, "if I can endure it long enough after he returns to get entirely rid of that mortgage. Well, I'll have to wait until he does return, anyway, and then I ought to give him, I suppose, two or three weeks' notice. Perhaps, when he comes home this time, he'll be more as he used to be and it won't be so difficult. I'll wait until then before I decide."

As she came to this conclusion she was entering the ticket gate of the ferry waiting room and, lifting her eyes from the dropping of her ticket in the box, she saw a young man of goodly figure, dressed in a loose fitting suit of gray, advancing toward her and lifting his soft felt hat. Even in the surprise of the moment she was conscious of a quick effort to keep out of her countenance the full measure of the joy she felt at this unexpected meeting with Hugh Gordon. But she was not successful enough to hide all signs of the pleasure that swept through her and shone in her smile of welcome.

"Will you let me cross the ferry with you?" he said as he guided her through the crowd to a vantage point near the gate. "I did not go to the office, and I shall not go there again, because I know what orders Felix gave concerning me and I will not subject you to any unpleasant experience with his violent temper."

Henrietta looked at him in surprise, wondering how, since there was evidently bitter enmity between the two men, this one should have such intimate knowledge of the characteristics that had but lately appeared in the other.

"But the ferry boat," he was saying, with one of the smiles that so rarely lighted his serious countenance, "is nobody's private property and you are the only one who can forbid me to ride across the bay in it at just the time when you are going home."

He must have read encouragement rather than objection in her manner, for the next evening he was waiting for her again, and by the end of the week it had become a tacit understanding between them that they should meet thus and take together the ride across the shining evening water. Golden red it glowed and sparkled all about them and spread a radiant path toward the red and gold of the May sunset. Behind them Manhattan reared its mighty, tawny-yellow walls and towers through the golden haze—Mammon rising from the waves, with feet lapped in the rose-gold waters and front ablaze with the diamond dazzle of a thousand sunset-lighted windows.

It was the month of May, nature's month of marvels, when with her magic wand she strikes upon earth, and tree, and plant, and human heart, and the indwelling, everlasting life and youth gush forth in countless streams of leaf and bloom and song and leaping spirit. All through the marvelous month these two rode back and forth every day across the enchanted waters. For it was not long until she began to find him waiting for her in the morning also, at the door of the ferry-house in St. George.

All the world was robed in the young beauty of the spring, but Henrietta Marne soon discovered that for her companion it had but slight appeal. If she, thrilled by the pageant of sunset colors, glowing in the sky and reflected in the waters of the bay, voiced her delight in it Gordon's response would be polite but perfunctory. He would look and make comment, but she knew that it left him cold. If she wore a flower at her belt or her throat, chosen with utmost care to make a tender little harmony of color with her waist or her tie or the faint pink of her cheeks, it nettled her a little that he did not even seem to see it.

"If I do that at the office when Mr. Brand is there," she said to herself, "it's the first thing he sees and he always speaks about it and looks at it with pleasure and he—doesn't care anything about me!"

"I know, it is a defect of my nature," he said one day in response to a little gentle rallying on her part because of his lack of interest in an evening panorama of unusual beauty. "I know I lose a great deal of the pleasure of living because of it, but I can't help it. Something seems to have been left out of my make-up. But I hope that some time I shall recover it. You are so sensitive to these things, perhaps you can teach me how to feel them, too."

Their talk verged soon into the more or less confidential themes of personal viewpoints, experiences and ambitions. Henrietta noticed that Gordon said nothing about his past life, about his relatives or friends or where he had grown up, or gone to school, or what he had done in his youth. But he was full of hopes and plans for the future. His brain was busy working out ideas for large industrial schemes that should prove the possibility of combining reasonable profit for their creators and managers with ample wages, comfortable homes and expanding lives for their workers. In his mind projects were taking form, though vague as yet, for renovating those noisome places of the city where human nature, undiluted by space, stews corrosion and corruption for its souls and bodies. Every day he would give her a glimpse of one or another of a multitude of half formed ideas, perhaps but just conceived, perhaps taking tentative form, which he was eager to work out and put to practical test. For the most part they seemed to her to be an unusual combination of business shrewdness, just feeling, and altruistic intent. Apparently his aim in them was to attain the end of social betterment by means of the co-operative and mutually profitable effort of all concerned in them.

He talked much and with enthusiasm of these things and Henrietta soon found that they and kindred hopes and plans were the purpose and the inspiration of his life.

"I have the business instinct," he told her one day. "It is easy to make money. It is a pleasure, too, to busy one's mind with large schemes and see them coming your way. But that is nothing to the pleasure it will be to set to work, as I shall soon be able to do, upon some of these schemes and see them coming out as I want them to."

"Your pleasure then will be a double one," she said, "the pleasure of creating something and that of doing good as well. Mr. Brand must have that double pleasure, too, when he feels all his faculties at work and knows that he is creating something that is beautiful, as you will feel that you are doing something good."

His face darkened and his eyes flashed at the sound of Brand's name. She felt that he stiffened, mind and body, into hostility.

"Pardon me," he said curtly, "if I am not pleased with the comparison. I consider Felix Brand, his ideas and principles and his mode of life, to be so thoroughly detestable that even the mention of his name rouses my contempt and disgust. I consider him," Gordon went on, his tones lower and more tense, "a plague spot, a source of evil that would be a menace to any community."

"Oh, Mr. Gordon!" she protested. "Aren't you exaggerating dreadfully? Aren't you prejudiced against him? Think of the beautiful buildings he creates and of the elevating and refining influence of such noble and beautiful architecture!"

"I know," he assented, "the man has genius, great genius. He has proved that already, and he might have gone farther in his line and done much finer and greater things, if he had lived a different life. But he is bringing his fate upon himself." He paused for an instant, and she, wondering what he meant by that last dark sentence, which he had spoken in a tone of the most serious significance, was about to ask him for an explanation when he turned upon her abruptly.

"Tell me," he demanded, "do you think that a man is to be pardoned for being a source of evil, for leading or forcing others into wrong-doing and misfortune, while he keeps himself prosperous and honored, just because he can create beautiful things in art, or architecture, or music, or literature? Is the world in greater need of being made more beautiful and more pleasurable for the few than it is of being made better for the many? Would you condone a man for deliberately making it worse because he was adding to its beauty?"

Gordon's intent gaze and the solemn, eager earnestness with which he spoke appalled his listener ever so little. It was as if he were asking these questions from his inmost, deepest heart.

"I—I don't know just what to say," she faltered. "I never thought of the matter in that way before. One doesn't like to answer so serious a question offhand. But—" she hesitated and felt herself being swept into agreement by his very forcefulness of character and intensity of feeling. "Why, yes—I suppose you are right. If the world were entirely wicked it would be a failure, no matter how beautiful it might be."

"I was sure you would agree with me," he responded with a look of pleased satisfaction. "But now I want you to tell me something else," he pursued in a gentler tone and with a humbler, softer manner. "I want to suppose the case of two possible men and I want you to tell me which of the two you think would be the more deserving of life."

He moved closer to her and, leaning against the deck rail, was looking into her face with an expression so different from any she had ever seen in his brown eyes before, wistful and beseeching instead of confident, alert and dauntless, that it set her heart a-flutter with a sudden, tantalizing half-memory. Where, when, had she seen brown eyes with that look in them?

She groped after the answer in the back of her mind while she listened to his voice, still with its impetuous tones unsubdued, though he seemed to be trying to state his hypothetical case in cool, bare terms.

"Suppose there were two men," he was saying, "and suppose that one of them possessed a genius for the creation of noble and beautiful works of art of any sort, which would afford great pleasure to many people and would refine and elevate their tastes. But suppose that at the same time he was living such a private, even secret, life as made him a source of wickedness and corruption, an endless influence for evil. Then would such a man, do you think—" his voice sank lower and thrilled with solemn earnestness—"deserve to live rather than the other one, who, though he had no genius for the creation of beauty, was using all his powers to make the world a better place for all men to live in? If both men could not have the gift of life, Miss Marne, which do you think ought to have it?"

She looked at him, glanced away, and hesitated, her mind still bent on that teasing memory. "You are putting strange riddles to me this morning, Mr. Gordon," she demurred.

Had she ever seen a wild creature expecting destruction at human hands? No, surely not, she told herself, and yet this wistful pleading expression might be just the look in the eyes of an animal facing death but dumbly begging for life.

Then, in a flash, it all came back—her own little parlor, Billikins whining and hiding in her skirts in mysterious terror, and Felix Brand gazing at her with all the usual soft, caressing look of his brown eyes curtained behind some absorbing anxiety and fear. But in these eyes into which she was looking now there was no fear, only a longing that her answer should be what he wished. She shivered as a half-sensed intuition of impending tragedy shot through her.

"You—you make me feel as if I were a judge and called upon to pronounce sentence upon some one," she said and tried to pass the situation off with a little laugh as she added, "Really, it isn't fair!"

But he would not have it so and with even greater earnestness and solemnity pressed his question farther: "Then we'll put it another way. Suppose a mother about to bear a man-child could choose its soul and the life it was to live. Which of those two men would a good, noble woman wish her son to be? Imagine yourself in such a woman's place, Miss Marne, and tell me, which would be your choice."

She felt the compelling force of his earnestness and she was moved by the intense feeling evident in his voice, look and manner. Her face blanched with the sudden conviction that some high consequence hung upon her answer. But she took counsel bravely with herself for a little space as her gaze wandered across the water.

"I think," she replied slowly, "yes, I'm quite sure, any good woman would wish her son to be good rather than great. I don't believe any good woman would hesitate at all, if it were possible for her to make such a choice."

He straightened up and a solemn joy overspread his eyes and face. "I thank you, Miss Marne," he said, barely resting for an instant one hand upon hers that lay on the rail. "I had little doubt what your answer would be, because you are a good woman. But I wanted to know for a certainty. It is my final warrant that I am right."

He said no more, and Henrietta, a little awed by the rapt, triumphant look with which, sitting upright with head thrown back, he gazed into the distance, kept silence also. And in a few moments their ship bumped into its berth and they joined silently the crowd that pressed forward.

After that she was conscious in his manner toward her of an increased air of guardianship. It gave her a warm sense of comfort and security and she found herself gradually confiding in it more and more. She even sought his advice, finally, upon the intimate personal problems that were troubling her so deeply. Did he think she ought to permit her sister to motor with Mr. Brand? Was it likely that she herself could find another situation that would carry her safely out of her financial difficulties if she should continue to find her work under Mr. Brand so disagreeable?

"I hesitate to say anything to you about these things, because I know how much you dislike him," she apologized, "but I feel so uncertain and so much worried about them, and there is nobody else to whom I can go who knows him as well as you do. His whole character has changed so much in the last few months that he hardly seems to be the same man. I have an uneasy feeling that it isn't wise for my sister to go with him, although it does seem the most innocent thing in the world, and the kindest, for him to stop at our house, when he has some business farther down the island, and take Isabella for a spin. She enjoys it so much and she has so few pleasures. And she and mother have such confidence in Mr. Brand that they feel sure he would never ask her to do anything that wasn't perfectly all right. I felt that way, too, at first, but I don't now."

"I am glad you have spoken of it," he replied with interest, "for I have been thinking I ought to give you some warning before Felix returns. He is simply serving a purpose of his own, an utterly selfish purpose, and he is using her to help him gain his end without the least compunction. Don't let her go again, Miss Marne, if you can help it. I know Felix Brand through and through, and he is not to be trusted."

Henrietta could only look at him speechless, her eyes wide with apprehension.

"Don't be alarmed," he hastened to assure her. "I don't think there is anything for you to be uneasy about, except that his influence is always evil—" he paused on a raised inflection and looked at her admiringly. "One of the reasons," he went on regardless of the abrupt change, "why I like you and feel so sure that you are sound and good and strong clear through is because you have not yielded in the least to the subtle influence he has over most people. You have held to your own ideas of what is right and wrong."

She blushed under his eyes and his words. "I'm afraid I don't deserve all that credit. I remember a time when I did have some ugly feelings and some tempestuous desires for pleasures that were out of my reach. But I had too many other things to do and to think about, and so I guess I outgrew them."

"And I guess, too, that they didn't find congenial soil in your heart to take root in," he added. "But you needn't be much worried about your sister, for I am sure it will not last much longer. At the best—or worst—there will not be many more opportunities—" again he straightened up and sent that triumphant glance of his alert, confident eyes out across the water—"in which it will be possible for him to work any evil. But he is so thoroughly base that if I were you I would not trust her with him again."

Henrietta wondered what he meant by that "not many more opportunities," but forebore to ask him lest she might unintentionally pry into some matter of which he did not wish to speak. Another enigmatical fragment from his secret thought came out when she asked his advice about her own relations with Brand. She told him how repugnant she was beginning to find her work because—and here she skipped lightly and diplomatically over her reasons, so that she might not do violence to her own sense of loyalty to her employer—she did not now feel in harmony with his methods of doing business and his ways of looking at a good many things.

"You don't need to put it in so roundabout a way," he told her impulsively. "I know all about that change in the man's character and how nearly he has lost all sense of truth and honesty. Luckily, he still controls his temper with you and treats you with respect——"

He stopped and his whole manner suddenly bristled with aggressiveness. In his voice as he spoke the next words there was a significant ring: "And I don't think he'll do otherwise. But of course you can't put up much longer with these developments in him. I would advise you to look for another position at once. In fact, I am sure you'd better, because it won't be long until Felix will not need you."

She gazed at him with such question and alarm in her eyes, that he returned her look with surprise. "Oh," he exclaimed, "I see. You are puzzled by what I said. I forgot for the moment,—perhaps I have before, too—that you do not know all that I do about Felix. But don't be troubled about it now. Some day you shall know—I shall tell you—the whole story. I dare say it will seem marvelous to you at first. But you will soon see how inevitable it has all been. Felix will return soon, I suppose."

"Oh, I hope so," Henrietta broke in. "He has been gone five weeks and his affairs are in an awful condition!"

Gordon nodded. "Yes, they must be. It is quite time for him to come back and put them in order. But I warn you, Miss Marne, that it will be wise for you not to mention my name to him when he does return. He hates me so furiously and he has so little control over that violent temper he has developed, that there is no telling what he will say or do if any one so much as speaks of me in his presence. You remember his outrageous conduct to Mrs. Fenlow?"

"Oh, did Mrs. Fenlow tell you about that?" Henrietta asked with a quick look of surprise that was reminiscent, too, of the shock the incident had given her. "I thought she mentioned your name. Was that what made him so angry?"

"That was what caused his final brutality. The trouble was about Mark Fenlow. You know how fond and proud of him his mother has been and what high expectations she has always had for him. Felix had got him into the way of gambling and the boy had developed a passion for it which he could not restrain. Ever since Felix has had money he has played a good deal, and for pretty high stakes, because of the pleasure he got out of it. But he knew when to stop, just as he did with all his vicious indulgences."

Gordon's eyes were flashing and his voice growing tense with hostile feeling. But Henrietta saw that he was making a strong effort to keep himself under control and to speak calmly about his enemy.

"That is," he went on, "he used to be able to stop before doing himself injury. He didn't care what happened to others. But he can't now. The gambler's mania has got hold of him in just the same way that he's lost control of his temper, and he's likely, if he keeps on, to gamble away everything he's got. He liked Mark Fenlow and led him into more evil than just the gambling. But it was that that proved the boy's ruin. It was the old story—playing, losing, borrowing, financial difficulties, the temptation of money in sight, the belief that he could pay it back the next day. His last filchings, which brought about discovery and confession of the whole business to his mother and father, were due to the fact that Felix was ruthlessly pressing him to pay back some borrowed money. That was why Mrs. Fenlow went up to Felix's office and told him what she thought of him. Weeks ago I went to the boy and tried to reason with him about the way he was going and persuade him to quit, short off. He told his mother about that, too, and that was how she happened to mention my name in their controversy."

"Poor Mrs. Fenlow!" said Henrietta. "I knew she must be in some great trouble that morning. But what has become of Mark?"

"His father made good his peculations and hushed the matter all up, and then they sent him out west to a cattle ranch."



CHAPTER XVIII

ISABELLA TAKES ONE MORE RIDE

Henrietta Marne looked curiously at the envelope bearing the stamp of Hugh Gordon's business firm. "There is always a letter from Mr. Gordon just before Mr. Brand gets back," she said to herself, "so I suppose he'll be here some time today. If he does I'll have to decide about leaving him. But there'll be such a lot of work to do it won't be fair for me to say anything about going till we get things straightened out again."

On that same June morning Penelope Brand was reading a letter in a similar envelope. She was out of doors, in her wheel-chair, in the shade of that same tree from which she had fallen, years before, to such pitiful maiming of her body and her life. Beside her was a little table holding some books, a pad of paper and a pencil and her work-basket. For here she spent the greater part of every fine day, by turns reading, making notes, writing, sewing, and talking with her mother. The roses that grew along the fence were in bloom and a few steps in the other direction was the little vegetable garden where her mother worked when the sun was not too hot, so near that they could speak to each other now and then.

Penelope was beginning to find a new pleasure in life, the deepest of all pleasures to the woman-heart, the pleasure of service. For Hugh Gordon had been sending her books treating of the sociological questions in which she had long taken an intellectual interest and had asked her to make digests of them for him, to tell him what she thought of them and to write him at length upon such of their contents as seemed to her of particular consequence. She had had a number of letters from him discussing these things and outlining plans upon which he wanted her opinion.

All this was affording her the keenest satisfaction. Her mother, who had never seen her so genuinely happy and contented, beamed with shy delight over the new pleasure that had come into their lives. For her it was sadly darkened by her son's violent antagonism to their new friend. They had learned that they must not mention Hugh Gordon's name to him even in letters, and when he last came to see them, on one of his brief and infrequent visits, they had trembled with anxiety during the whole of his stay lest they might inadvertently approach too near the subject that now loomed so large in the narrow round of their lives and had brought such freshening and broadening of their interests.

They speculated much as to the cause of the animosity between the two men, and it was evident to Mrs. Brand, in all their talk, that her daughter's sympathies were with Hugh Gordon. For Penelope, deep in her heart, well concealed from her mother, had long harbored a feeling toward her brother that was very near distrust and contempt. Mrs. Brand had found in Hugh Gordon and the affection he plainly longed to give and receive, a young man fashioned so much more after her spirit than was her own son that her mother-heart yearned to enfold him also in its love. It grieved her deeply to know how intense was the bitterness between them.

"If they could only both be my boys, and be good friends," she said to Penelope, with brimming eyes.

As Penelope opened her letter from Hugh Gordon she gazed with astonishment at the check it contained, a check for a bigger sum than she and her mother had ever possessed.

"Dear Sister Penelope," she read. "For you didn't say that I mustn't call you sister, and so I shall, because you know that is the way I think of you. I am very happy just now thinking how surprised you will be when you see this check. It is some money that I borrowed of Felix last winter when I wanted to start in business. I am now paying it back to you and your mother instead of to him, because I know that he is not taking care of you as he ought, and also because I know that if I pay it to him he will merely make some bad and wasteful use of it. Enclosed you will find a memorandum of the date, the principal, rate, interest and amount. I shall tell him that I have sent it to you.

"I have wanted very much to see you during this last month, for there are many things to talk over with you at more length than is possible by letter. But I knew what a rage it put Felix into when he learned about my being there the last time and how unhappy his anger and violent talk made both of you, and especially your mother, and I didn't want to subject you to such an experience again.

"But the time is coming soon when I shall be able to visit you as often as you will let me. I am looking forward to that time with such anticipations of happiness as I hardly dare tell you about. If you should decide against me, if you should not feel toward me as I hope you will—but, no, that would not be possible. And so I shall go on thinking of the happy times we shall have when I run over often to see you and when I take both of you upon little trips—to the seashore, to New York, wherever you think you would like to go. For we can make that sort of pleasure possible for you, Penelope, if you want to undertake it.

"It will all be decided and everything explained the next time I see you. But to prepare the way for all that I shall have to tell you, so that you will be ready to listen to it understandingly, I am sending you a book to read in the meantime. You will find in it one of the wonder stories of modern science, and in its light that quick, keen mind of yours will go to the heart of this matter at once. You will see clearly through the essentials of the mystery you have already sensed in the relations between Felix and me. But I hope you will not make up your mind about it until I can explain to you the whole matter, from beginning to end. I think that will be soon, within two or three weeks. In the meantime, you will not hear from me again, for I shall have to go away for a while."

The rest of the letter was taken up with matters about which they had been conferring for some time. But Penelope was not able to find in them her usual interest, so deep was her absorption in Gordon's mystifying allusions and promises.

The anxious wonder they aroused in her, however, was hardly greater than the trepidation and the sense of mystery which descended upon Henrietta Marne as she studied, that same morning, the envelope of Gordon's letter to Felix Brand. Why should such a letter always herald Brand's return from these unaccountable absences, which grew ever longer and of darker omen? What had Hugh Gordon meant by those two or three curt, unconsidered sentences that seemed to hint at some uncanny fate toward which Brand was hastening? And what would be the architect's demeanor now? Would it be such that she could not stay longer in his employ? With all the financial risk involved would she yet feel that she must go forth and look for another position?

This last question did not long remain unanswered in her mind. Brand's manner, it was true, had not lost entirely its habitual suavity and polish. Formerly she had thought these to be the genuine expression of the innate refinement and kindness of his nature. But now, as if some inner corrosion were eating its way outward, she found that they had ceased to be anything more than the thinnest veneer, through which often broke, in words, or manner, or look, peevish irritation or sullen anger.

"It's as if he were just seething inside," said Henrietta to herself after he had been back several days, "about something or other that makes him too angry to control himself. Well, that's no reason why he should take it out on me, as he did today. I wish I could see Mr. Gordon again. Well, anyway, I can't stand this any longer. I'm sure he'd advise me not to. Mr. Brand is much worse than he was before he went away, and he looks as if he were the bad, base man that Hugh Gordon says he is. I shall tell him at once that he'll have to find another secretary."

When she told her mother and sister that she had decided to look for another position, she had to face a chorus of amazed protests and she found it difficult to convince them of the soundness of her reasons.

"He seems to have lost all sense of honor," she told them. "In all the business that he carries on through me by correspondence and sometimes by my seeing people, too, he lies and cheats even when I can't see, sometimes, that he expects to gain anything by it. And I don't want to be a party to that kind of thing any longer, even if I am only a sort of a machine. And he is growing so ill-tempered and irritable and rude that I really can't endure it."

"Oh, well, don't worry about it, Harry," said Isabella with her usual optimism. "You'll soon get another position. Please make it part of your bargain next time that your employer must come over here and take me out motoring quite frequently, if not oftener."

"That reminds me, Bella, that I want to ask you not to go with Mr. Brand again. I'm sure he's not the kind of man we've always thought him."

"Oh, nonsense!" Bella rejoined, breezily. "Don't be alarmed for your handsome Felix Brand. It doesn't do him a bit of harm and I have a lot of fun. Don't worry about me, Harry. I'm not an infant. And I don't suppose I'll be offered any more perquisites of that sort, now that you're going to leave him. Poor little me!"

Henrietta found her employer in a particularly trying mood the next morning. He looked tired and worn, as though he had not slept, and his mobile countenance, always so eloquent of his state of mind that every changing emotion shone through it as through a window into his soul, told of secret harassment. So also did his tense nerves, which seemed wrought up almost to the snapping point. They vented themselves in frequent bursts of irritability and snarling anger. His secretary noticed that he started at every sudden sound, and sometimes also when she had heard nothing, and that then he would look round him in an alarmed, furtive way, as if he expected to see some menace take form out of the air. To her relief he did not return to the office after luncheon. If she had known that he was speeding in his automobile toward her home she would have taken less comfort in her quiet afternoon.