“Paul Bronlee, indeed!” she muttered.
She crossed over to her escritoire and from a locked drawer took out an autographed photograph of Templeton Druid. Her heart leapt as she gazed at it. Ah, there was a man! And he loved her! She held the pictured likeness to her lips, then held it at arm’s length as she half whispered:
“And they would talk to me about Paul Bronlee when I have you, dear heart! But never fear—I’ll show them I have a mind of my own. Looks as if I was going to have trouble with dad, too, but we’ll both show them. Marry first and tell them after—that’s the idea.”
Tenderly as though the pictured likeness were a living entity, she placed it back in its drawer which she carefully locked. Then she turned to ring for her maid. When Marie’s soft knock came on the door, Elinor Benton was lounging in a deep easy chair, her fair head nodding, but her thoughts wide awake, her mind filled with the image of one man.
In his favorite nook in the library, Hugh Benton was doing some thinking on his own account. What Elinor had said about an eventual marriage had disturbed him a little, but he passed it over hurriedly as a thing of the future. His great ambition was for his daughter to make a good marriage,—in which respect he was still like his wife, but to-night any future marriage of Elinor’s was of minor consideration. It was himself, what he was to do with his own life that had suddenly risen to stare him in the face. He felt that he was facing some sort of crisis, vague, it was true, but nevertheless imminent. He had paced the floor for a long time, till his subconscious mind had taken in every detail of the thick rug before he realized he was tired. He sank into his deep leather chair and sat facing the fire which, even in summer, was kept lighted here in the evenings. He must face squarely the thing that was worrying him—be honest with himself, at least. His lighted cigar fell into ash as he moodily stared before him, recalling the past, dreaming of what the future might be, if only——
He had been married to Marjorie for twenty-one years; now, the plain fact of the matter was he had fallen in love with another woman at first sight, precisely as a boy of twenty might have done. At first he severely criticised his own weakness, and then, suddenly and furiously, he blamed his wife for it all. She alone was responsible for the indifference existing between them. Their lives together under the same roof had been a mockery for the past few years. Had an atmosphere of congeniality and warmth prevailed in his home, he would not have been so susceptible to the charms of a beautiful and fascinating woman. Only a few weeks before he had threatened Marjorie that should the opportunity present itself, he would grasp elsewhere the happiness he could not obtain in his own home, little dreaming at that time how soon he would lose his head.
Dawn showed grayly through the half-drawn curtains. Completely worn out, he rose and went slowly up the stairs to his room, his perplexing problem still unsolved. It had left him utterly at sea. Well, matters would have to readjust themselves as best they could. He was in the hands of Fate, and would drift wherever the tide carried him. He realized, with just one slight pang of a resisting conscience that he did not feel the shame he should. The alluring prospects of an exciting adventure only caused him to experience a sensation of keen rebellion and joyous anticipation. So had actually changed the Hugh Benton of the Atwood days of sixteen years before.
CHAPTER IX
That all Hugh Benton’s problems were not concerned with his own troublesome heart where the fair Geraldine DeLacy was concerned, or with his daughter whose willfulness he feared might lead her into a marriage less desirable than the one he hoped for with Paul Bronlee, came home to him in a cataclysmic rush a few days later when Howard, his son, appeared on the immediate horizon. Howard had been so long at college that Hugh had got into the habit of thinking of him as merely a financial annoyance, the personal equation of which was luckily distant. There was not much affection between the two. There could not have been, since Hugh Benton had seen his son so rarely during those portions of his vacation the young man chose to spend in his home. But Hugh Benton never forgot his fatherly duties. He remembered that Howard was his son. And how, indeed, was he to forget it after that blithe and dashing young man had been home from college for a few weeks.
It was shortly after the Thurston dance that Howard had been graduated. It had been rather as much of a surprise to Howard that this had been accomplished as it had to anyone else—nevertheless, it had been done. He had flunked in everything the beginning of the term, but mysteriously he had managed to get through by an amazingly close margin.