John Boland felt none of this exultation when he returned to his office on the morning following Druce’s release. An indefinable oppression weighed him down. He had won, he knew—and yet the air about him seemed charged with prescience of evil. He tried to shake it off and could not. He was anxious, too, about Harry. Why, he asked himself, should he worry about an ungrateful son. John Boland did not know the answer, yet the answer was very plain. His son Harry was his own flesh and blood and no man can cut himself off from his own flesh and blood without feeling some sort of reaction.
John Boland, the man of brain and iron was only human after all. He loved his son.
He was in a state of gloomy meditation when he opened his desk and resumed his day’s work. The telephone bell jangled constantly. The councillors who had participated in the conference over Druce’s case which had resulted so happily were calling up to congratulate Boland on the success of his maneuver. Somehow these felicitations did not please him as his fellow advisers had expected.
His mood was gloomy. He could not shake it off. Constantly the same question returned to his mind he had won, yes, but what difference did it make? Was he any happier? Was the world any better? Boland had never been worried by questions of this sort before. He could not answer them.
He was still in this gray mood when the guardian of his door announced the arrival of Grogan. Michael Grogan was, perhaps, Boland’s most intimate friend. He had not taken Grogan into his confidence when he planned his coup to release Druce. He felt that Grogan would not be in sympathy with his campaign for destroying the work of the reformers. Still he was glad to see Grogan. After all he was a friend. And this morning John Boland, for the first time, perhaps, in his life, felt the need of a friend.
“John,” said Grogan taking a seat, “I see you’ve ‘sprung’ Druce?”
“Yes? Mike you’re an inveterate reader of the newspapers.”
“They’re yelling about it this morning.”
“Let them yell.”
“You did it?”