“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.