“It ought to make them ashamed of themselves,” thought Henrietta as she typed the letter. “I never heard of such injustice! They ought to beg his pardon and ask him to keep the office.”
No such missive of apology and reparation came, although Henrietta more than half expected it. But Felix Brand cherished no such hope. Instead, premonitions of disaster of which these two episodes would be but the beginning, began to dog his thoughts. His heart was sore with disappointment and mortification, and his breast swelled with bitter resentment against the man whose deliberate action had started this series of events. As he dwelt upon the blasting of his immediate hopes, the smirching of his reputation and the sudden sharp check to the sweeping course of his career, his eyes would burn with hate and anger.
The old look of worry returned to his face, but with it was combined one of grim determination that set in hard lines his usually soft and smiling mouth. Sometimes, Henrietta, coming suddenly into his private office, surprised in his countenance signs of fear. But what she oftenest saw there was the look of dogged resolution. She began to be conscious, too, of some sort of struggle going on within him. She could see it in these unaccustomed expressions of his countenance, hear it in the petulant voice in which he sometimes addressed her, so different from his usual suave tones, and feel it in the nervous strain under which he was evidently laboring.
As the days went by the very atmosphere in which they worked seemed to her to grow tense with it, and on days when it was necessary for her to be much in his room she would go home in the evening with her own nerves quivering from its influence.
On a day in early March, a bracing day of brilliant sky, clear air and sharp west wind, Brand said to Henrietta when he left the office for luncheon that probably he would not return in the afternoon. “I think,” he said, “that I shall go across to Staten Island and motor down to Macfarlane’s property and get a general idea of the site and the surroundings.”
“A splendid idea,” she assented with enthusiasm. “It’s such a fine day, the ride will do you good.”
“Do you think,” he said with a smile, “that your sister would bear me company?”
“I’m sure she would be delighted,” Henrietta smiled back, and not until an hour later did she remember, with a little qualm of doubtfulness, Mildred Annister’s evident jealousy of their previous motor ride.
“Dear Mildred!” she thought. “She is so completely wrapped up in her love. I wish Dr. Annister would consent for them to be married soon. It would make Mildred so happy and I’m sure it would be a good thing for Mr. Brand.”
When Henrietta reached home she found her sister only just returned, and in high spirits. At dinner, her eyes sparkling and her cheeks flushed with delicate pink, her droll little stories, and her merry laughter kept them all in a gay humor.