“I’m going up with you, my dear, if you’ll let me. I want to see Mr. Brand without delay and if he isn’t here yet I’ll wait for him.”
Miss Marne, busy at her desk with the morning’s mail, heard sounds from her employer’s private room during Mrs. Fenlow’s call that betokened a change in the friendly relations formerly existing between them. She could hear the woman’s voice raised in what seemed to be bitter denunciation and the man’s replying in sneering tones. These seemed so unlike Felix Brand that she paused for a moment in her work, astonished at the unaccustomed note. During the last few weeks she had seen him several times give way to sudden temper, but even these outbursts, unprecedented though they were in her experience of him, had not seemed to her so foreign to his usual affable manner and pleasant speech as did the harsh, sarcastic antagonism of the voice in which she could hear him speaking to Mrs. Fenlow.
“But it must be Mr. Brand,” thought his secretary, looking in puzzled wonder at the door into his room, “for there’s surely nobody else in there.”
As she gazed, held by her surprise, a letter in her hands, the wrathful voices rose again, now one, then the other, and in Mrs. Fenlow’s she presently caught the words, “Hugh Gordon.”
At that came the sound of the man springing to his feet, of an overturned chair rattling to the floor, of a blow upon his desk and a loud and angry oath. The girl started with a whispered exclamation of amazement and horror. Her shocked ears heard her employer denouncing both Gordon and his caller and heard the rustle of the woman’s dress as she hurried across the room.
In her anger and indignation Mrs. Fenlow had rushed to the first door that met her eyes, which chanced to be the one into Henrietta’s room. As she opened it she flung back over her shoulder at Brand, in a white heat of scorn and wrath:
“You whited sepulchre! I’m done with you and all my friends shall know what you are!”
She rushed past Henrietta without seeming to see her, and on through the outer room into the corridor. The door into Brand’s office was left wide open and Henrietta saw him standing beside his desk, his face so distorted with passion that for a moment she doubted that it was he, and, apparently—and here again she could hardly believe her eyes—shaking his fist at his departing visitor.