But still Bram felt that he had at last some emotion in common with this man, whom he had so far only despised. Theodore even felt the disgrace, the moral shame of this awful disaster to his daughter more keenly than any one would have given him credit for.
As for Bram himself, he went home, he ate his breakfast, he started for the town almost in his usual manner. No one who passed him detected any sign in his look or in his manner of the blow which had fallen upon him. But, for all that, he was suffering so keenly, so bitterly, that the very intensity of his pain had a numbing effect, reducing him to the level of a brute which can see, and hear, and taste, and smell, but in which all sense of anything higher is dead and cold.
It was not until he had nearly passed the garden of the farm, keeping his eyes carefully turned in the opposite direction, that a bend in the road caught his eye, where not many evenings before he had seen Claire standing with a letter in her hand, waiting for some one to pass who would take it to the post for her.
And his face twitched; from between his closed teeth there came a sort of strangled sob, the sound which in Theodore had roused his contempt. He remembered the smile which had come into her eyes when he came by, the word of thanks with which she had slipped the letter into his hand, and run indoors. He remembered that a scent of lavender had come to him as she passed, that he had felt a thrill at the sound, the sight of her flying skirts as she fled into the house.
Oh! it was not possible that she could have done this thing, she who was so proud, so pure, so tender to her friends!
And Bram stopped in the middle of the road, with an upward bound of the heart, and told himself that the thing was a lie.
What a base wretch he was to have harbored such a thought of her! She was gone; but what proof had they but their own mean and base suspicions that she had not gone alone?
And Bram by a strong effort threw off the dark cloud which was pressing down upon his soul, or at least lifted one corner of it, and strode down towards the office resolved to trust, to hope, in spite of everything.
At the office everything was reassuringly normal in the daily routine. And, by a great and unceasing effort, Bram had really got himself to hold his opinions on the one great subject in suspense, when a carriage drove up to the door, and a few minutes later young Mrs. Christian, with a face which betrayed that she was suffering from acute distress, came into the office.