And he hung up the receiver, and sat motionless again. The dummy had disappeared!
To Montague this incident meant a change in the prospect of his whole life. It was the collapse of all his hopes. He had nothing more to work for, nothing more to think about; the bottom had fallen out of his career!
He was burning with a sense of outrage. He had been tricked and made a fool of; he had been used and flung aside. And now there was nothing he could do—he was utterly helpless. What affected him most was his sense of the overwhelming magnitude of the powers which had made him their puppet; of the utter futility of the efforts that he or any other man could make against them. They were like elemental, cosmic forces; they held all the world in their grip, and a common man was as much at their mercy as a bit of chaff in a tempest.
All day long he sat in his office, brooding and nursing his wrath. He had moods when he wished to drop everything, to shake the dust of the city from his feet, and go back home and recollect what it was to be a gentleman. And then again he had fighting moods, when he wished to devote all his life to punishing the men who had made use of him. He would get hold of some other policy-holder in the Fidelity, one whom he could trust; he would take the case without pay, and carry it through to the end! He would force the newspapers to talk about it—he would force the people to heed what he said!
And then, toward evening, he went home, bitter and sore. And there was his brother sitting in his study, waiting for him.
“Hello,” he said, and took off his coat, preparing his mind for one more ignominy—the telling of his misfortune to Oliver, and listening to his inevitable, “I told you so.”
But Oliver himself had something to communicate something that would not bear keeping. He broke out at once—“Tell me, Allan! What in the world has happened between you and Mrs. Winnie?”
“What do you mean?” asked Montague, sharply.
“Why,” said Oliver, “everybody is talking about some kind of a quarrel.”
“There has been no quarrel,” said Montague.