AT breakfast Alice did not appear, and when he went upstairs to her room, she returned an answer in a sullen voice through her closed door. All day his heart was oppressed by the thought of her, but to his surprise, when he came home to luncheon, she met him on the steps with a smiling face. It was evident to him at the first glance that she meant to ignore both the cause and the occasion of last evening's outburst; and he found himself yielding to her determination before he realised all that his evasion of the subject must imply. But while she hung upon his neck, with her cheek pressed to his, it was impossible that he should speak any word that would revive her anger against him. Anything was better than the violence with which she had parted from him the evening before. He could never forget his night of anguish, when he had strained his ears unceasingly for some stir in her room, hoping that a poignant realisation of his love for her would bring her sobbing and penitent to his door before dawn.
Now when he saw her again for the first time, she had apparently forgotten the parting which had so tortured his heart.
"You've been working too hard, papa, and you're tired," she remarked, rubbing the furrows between his eyebrows in a vain endeavour to smooth them out. "Are you obliged to go back to that hateful office this afternoon?"
"I've some work that will keep me there until dark, I fear," he replied. "It's a pity because I'd like a ride of all things."
"It is a pity, poor dear," protested Alice, but he noticed that there was no alteration in her sparkling gaiety. Was there, indeed, almost a hint of relief in her tone? and was this demonstrative embrace but a guarded confession of her gratitude for his absence? Something in her manner—a veiled excitement in her look, a subtle change in her voice—caused him to hold her to him in a keener tenderness. It was on his lips to beg for her confidence, to remind her of his sympathy in whatever she might feel or think—to assure her even of his tolerance of Geoffrey Heath. But in the instant when he was about to speak, a sudden recollection of the look with which she had turned from him last evening, checked the impulse before it had had time to pass into words. And so because of his terror of losing her, he let her go at last in silence from his arms.
His office work that afternoon was heavier than usual, for in the midst of his mechanical copying and filing, he was abstracted by the memory of that strange, unnatural vivacity in Alice's face. Then in the effort to banish the disturbing recollection, he recalled old Adam Crowley, wrapped in his knitted shawl, on the doorstep of his cottage. A check of Richard's contributing six hundred dollars toward the purchase of a new organ for the church he attended gave Daniel his first opportunity to mention the old man to his uncle.
"I saw Crowley the other day," he began abruptly, "the man who was my father's clerk for forty years, and whose place," he added smiling, "I seem to have filled."
"Ah, indeed," remarked Richard quietly. "So he is still living?"
"His right arm has been paralysed, as you know, and he is very poor. All his savings were lost in some investments he made by my father's advice."
"So I have heard—it was most unfortunate."