She reviewed their talk and reassured herself, with much gratification, that nowhere had it touched what the most sensitive loyalty to her employer could have thought forbidden ground.
“It’s very curious,” she marvelled, “how he knows about Mr. Brand’s affairs. They must be the very closest friends or he could never know so much about Mr. Brand’s ambitions and how he feels about his art. And yet there was a flash in his eyes every time Mr. Brand’s name was mentioned, and he looked just as if he were trying to control an angry feeling. Still, they are surely friends.... His mustache is very handsome. I wonder why he doesn’t let it grow longer.”
Toward the end of the week he came again and renewed his assurances of Brand’s safety, and again they talked happily together for a length of time that startled Henrietta when she looked at her watch after he left. Her confidence in him increased with each interview and so also did her puzzlement as to his relations with Felix Brand. For several days she debated with herself as to what she ought to do and at last, in her anxiety and doubt, she sought the counsel of Dr. Annister.
She told him the whole story, admitting that she did not herself believe the architect had taken the southern trip, giving her reasons for that suspicion, describing the three visits of Hugh Gordon and recounting the assurances he had made her of Brand’s safety and early return.
“I haven’t come to you before, Dr. Annister,” she said, “because I didn’t like to worry you about it. I know what a nervous condition Mildred is in, anyway, because she doesn’t hear from him and I thought that if she guessed the real state of affairs it would be ten times harder for her.”
“I fear Mildred will have a nervous collapse if he does not return soon,” said Dr. Annister gravely, “or we do not get some assurance that all is well with him. You say that this Hugh Gordon declares he doesn’t know where Felix is?”
“Yes, that is what he says, but at the same time he seems so confident there can be nothing wrong that when I talk with him I feel it will be all right. And then afterwards I wonder if I am doing the right thing in keeping it all so quiet. Do you think, Dr. Annister, that we ought to put the case into the hands of the detectives? You know, if we did that and then he should come back in a few days, as he did before, he would be dreadfully annoyed.”
Dr. Annister, in a shabby leather arm-chair, in whose roomy depths his undersized figure seemed smaller than ever, leaned forward with his elbows on its arms and thoughtfully struck together the ends of his fingers.
They were in his private office, where this chair had been for twenty years his favorite seat. It was his attitude and gesture of deepest abstraction. Many a time, sitting thus, and gazing with intent eyes on nothing at all, had he found light on difficult cases. And many a nervous wreck among his patients had marched back to health and vigor to the rhythmic tapping of those finger-ends.
Just now he was considering the possibility that Felix Brand, the famous young architect, his son-in-law to be, might have sunk out of sight intentionally in order to indulge in deeply hidden debauch. Although it had but recently become manifest, that suggestion of sensuality in the young man’s refined and handsome countenance, the physician’s only ground of objection to the early marriage for which his daughter and her lover had pleaded, had grown stronger of late. But if Brand should be found in some low dive it might get out and the carrion-loving sensational newspapers would make an ill-smelling scandal into which Mildred’s name would be dragged. No, if that were the explanation, it would be better to let him return in his own good time and then have a serious talk with him and try to get at the truth.