"Heavens!" ejaculated Amidon. "How am I ever to get through with this?"
The genuine agony in Florian's tones fixed the attention of the little man, and seemed to arouse some terrible suspicion.
"Why, 'Gene," said he, "you don't mean that there's anything in this blonde matter, do you, that will—— By George! And she's a sister of one of the most prominent A. O. C. M.'s of Pittsburg—and you remember our solemn obligation!"
"No," said Amidon, "I don't!"
"What! You don't!"
"No!" said Florian. "I've forgotten it!"
"Forgotten it!" said his questioner, recoiling as if in horror. "Forgotten it! And with the sister of the Past Sovereign Pontiff of Pittsburg Lodge No. 863! I tell you, Brassfield, I don't believe it. I prefer to think you're bughouse! Cracked! Out of your head! But, 'Gene," added his unknown brother, in a stage-whisper, "if there has been anything between you and anything comes up, you know, Jim Alvord, for one, knowing and understanding your temptations—for the strawberry blondes are the very devil—will stand by you until the frost gathers six inches deep on the very hinges of—— Say, Mary's coming in at the side door. Good night! Keep a stiff upper lip; stay by Bess, and I'll stay by you, obligation or no obligation. 'F. D. and B.', you know: death, perhaps, but no desertion! So long! See you to-morrow."
And Amidon walked from the house of his unfamiliar chum, knowing that his sweetheart but once seen was waiting in her unknown home for him to come to her, and had as a basis for conversation the plans for their house. He could imagine her with the blue-prints unrolled, examining them with all a woman's interest in such things, and himself discussing with her this house in which she expected him to place her as mistress. And the position she thought she held in his heart—vacant, or—— He leaned against a fence, in bewilderment approaching despair. His mind dwelt with horror on the woman whom he could think of only under the coarse appellation of the strawberry blonde. Was there a real crime here to take the place of the imagined putting away of Brassfield? Brassfield! The very name sickened him. "Strawberry blondes, indeed!" thought Florian; and "Brassfield, the perjured villain!" Certain names used by the little man in the wrong house came to him as having been mentioned in the notes of the professor and the judge. Alvord, the slangy little chap who took so familiar an attitude toward him—this was the judge's "ministerial" friend! Yet, had there not been mention of "ritualistic work" and "Early Christians" in his conversation? And this woman of whom he spoke,—it took no great keenness of perception to see that the "strawberry blonde" must be the "child of six or eight years" whom he had called "Daisy," and sometimes "Strawberry!" Here was confirmation of Alvord's suspicion, if his allusion to the violation of an "obligation" expressed suspicion. Here was a situation from which every fiber of Amidon's nature revolted, seen from any angle, whether the viewpoint of the careful banker and pillar of society, or that of the poetic dreamer waiting for his predestined mate.
In a paroxysm of dread, he started for the hotel. Then he walked down the street toward the railway station, with the thought of boarding the first train out of town. This resolve, however, he changed, and I am glad to say that it was not the thought of the fortune of which Judge Blodgett had spoken that altered his resolution, but that of the letter which greeted his return to consciousness as Florian Amidon, and the image of the dark-eyed girl with the low voice and the strong figure, who had written it, and who waited for him, somewhere, with the roll of plans. So he began searching again for the house with the white columns; and found it on the next corner beyond the one he had first tried.
Elizabeth sat in a fit of depression at the strangeness of Mr. Brassfield's conduct—a depression which deepened as the evening wore on with no visit from him. She sprang to her feet and pressed both hands to her bosom, at the ring of the door-bell, ran lightly to the door and listened as the servant greeted Mr. Brassfield, and then hurried back to her seat by the grate, and became so absorbed in her book that she was oblivious of his being shown into the room, until the maid had retired, leaving him standing at gaze, his brow beaded with sweat, his face pale and his hands unsteady. The early Christian had entered on his martyrdom.