“Good-bye, Addie!”
He followed her into the hall. She did not look back at him, but went slowly up the stair with a dignity that was new in her. It was as though she wore her new wifehood as a protecting shield and cloak.
When he heard her door close he went up to his own room.
CHAPTER X
MR. WALSH MEETS MRS. CRAIGHILL
WINGFIELD was mistaken when he announced at the Allequippa Club, apropos of Walsh’s purchase of a controlling interest in the Wayne-Craighill Company, that Roger Craighill had never appreciated Walsh’s services. Colonel Craighill not only valued Walsh highly, but he took occasion to express, in a statement given to the newspapers, his “deep sense of loss upon the retirement of my faithful chief of staff, who after years of painstaking labour, reaps the reward of his own industry and fidelity.” More than this, Colonel Craighill made Walsh’s passing the occasion for a dinner to all the employees in his office and to the managers of the mines and coking plants in which he was interested. Walsh was thus used as an illustration of the qualities that make for honourable success. This banquet, provided at a leading hotel toward the end of October, was memorable on many accounts, and not least for the address delivered to the company by the head of the table—an utterance marked by noble sentiment and expressing the highest ideals of conduct in commercial life. Wingfield characterized this somewhat coarsely as “hot air” when he read it in the newspapers; the Colonel was, he averred, the Prince of the Platitudinous.
“The Colonel thinks he is looking through the windows of his soul upon Humanity,” remarked Wingfield to a shrewd, skilful occulist with whom he shared such heresies; “but the windows of his soul are all mirrors.” But Wingfield was almost the only man in town who refused to accept Roger Craighill at rather more than face value.
Wayne, glancing a few days later at Mrs. Blair’s list of persons to be invited to her reception in their stepmother’s honour, suggested that Walsh ought to be asked.
“Why Walsh?” asked Mrs. Blair bluntly. “When I pass him in the park driving his beautiful horses and with a long black cigar in his mouth, he makes me shudder.”
“When he takes up a list of accounts payable and runs his eye down the column, all the people who owe money anywhere on earth shudder. He’s a sphinx, but I like him. He’s been mighty good to me and if you don’t mind I’ll say that he will be missed at the office more than the Colonel knows.”
“Oh, tush, Wayne! Father has always said that no man is indispensable, and he wouldn’t have lost Walsh if he had needed him. Father’s proud that an old subordinate can go out of the office into a business of his own.”