The elevator whirled him down to the street level once more, and as he made his way from the building his senses gradually cleared.
What an escape! That was his first thought. Had Brewster been there, in his uncontrollable rage he must have betrayed himself, given the other an opportunity to gloat over him! His fastidious soul writhed from the thought of a vulgar, sordid scene; yet the one thing in all his domineering life which he had been unable to master was his own temper, and he knew and secretly feared it. After all, suppose his wife had called at Brewster’s office, that it was Brewster who had telephoned to her, Brewster whom she had gone at midnight to meet? Suppose the worst were true, these were all the facts he held with which to confront them; they could explain them away with some shallow lie and laugh in his very face! He must master himself, must bide his time until they should have played into his hands.
He strode on abruptly, heedless of the direction, shouldering from his path those who crowded in against him, unconscious of aught save the struggle which was taking place within him.
That it should have been Dick Brewster, of all men! Brewster, with his dapper little mustache and weak, effeminate face! Yet he was goodlooking, damn him, and attractive to women; younger, too, almost as young as Leila herself. Was that what George had meant when he spoke of people being thrown together intimately with too much money and not enough to do? Had he been trying to excuse them on the score of propinquity? When Storm in his own easy, complacent sophistry had twitted the other with being old-fashioned, George had asserted, with what seemed now to have added significance, that he went about enough to “hear things”. So this was what he had been driving at!
And Leila herself? At thought of her Storm felt his rage rising again in an overwhelming wave. Her tenderness, the years of their happiness, their love, were blotted out in the swift fury which consumed him at this affront to his pride, his dominance. Her beauty, her charm in which he had reveled almost as a personal attribute to himself, seemed all at once hideous, baleful to him. As her smiling face rose up before his memory he could have struck it down with his bare hands. If this despicable thing were true——!
He fought back the thought, succeeded at last in forcing a measure of calmness and dragged himself to his own office, where the interminable hours wore to a close. Then he went to a club; not that which he usually frequented when in town where the small-talk of his friends would madden him, but to an older, more sedate affair, a remnant of an earlier aristocracy to a membership in which his birth had automatically elected him. There he ordered a solitary meal and afterward sat in the somber, silent library with his eyes fixed upon the solemn clock. He had said that he would take the midnight train . . . .
Leila, after an equally solitary dinner had ensconced herself in her own dainty library at home that she might be near the telephone, should he call as he had tentatively suggested doing. No summons came, however, and it was after ten o’clock when a step sounded upon the veranda, and she sprang up, thrusting between the leaves of her book the letter over which she had been exulting; a letter which bore the superscription of the Leicester Building.
It was not her husband who stood before her when she opened the door. She paused, and then from the gloom of the veranda a voice spoke reassuringly:
“It is I, Mrs. Storm; Dick Brewster. I hope you and Norman will pardon the lateness of this call, but I must see you, if you will grant me a few minutes.” His quiet, pleasantly modulated voice seemed oddly shaken, and a quick constraint fell also upon Leila’s manner, but she held the door wide.
“Come in, of course, Mr. Brewster. My husband is not at home yet, and I am waiting up for him, You—you wanted to see him?”