nsider
the matter and the society can then decide whether or not to
ask for your resignation. The decision rests with you."

Brand immediately replied to the letter, complying with its
suggestion in dignified phrases that assured the directors of his
loyalty to the best interests of the society, although he was keenly
sensitive to the injustice that they were doing him.

"It ought to make them ashamed of themselves," thought Henrietta as
she typed the letter. "I never heard of such injustice! They ought to
beg his pardon and ask him to keep the office."

No such missive of apology and reparation came, although Henrietta
more than half expected it. But Felix Brand cherished no such hope.
Instead, premonitions of disaster of which these two episodes would be
but the beginning, began to dog his thoughts. His heart was sore with
disappointment and mortification, and his breast swelled with bitter
resentment against the man whose deliberate action had started this
series of events. As he dwelt upon the blasting of his immediate
hopes, the smirching of his reputation and the sudden sharp check to
the sweeping course of his career, his eyes would burn with hate and
anger.

The old look of worry returned to his face, but with it was combined
one of grim determination that set in hard lines his usually soft and
smiling mouth. Sometimes, Henrietta, coming suddenly into his private
office, surprised in his countenance signs of fear. But what she
oftenest saw there was the look of dogged resolution. She began to be
conscious, too, of some sort of struggle going on within him. She
could see it in these unaccustomed expressions of his countenance,
hear it in the petulant voice in which he sometimes addressed her, so
different from his usual suave tones, and feel it in the nervous
strain under which he was evidently laboring.

As the days went by the very atmosphere in which they worked seemed to
her to grow tense with it, and on days when it was necessary for her
to be much in his room she would go home in the evening with her own
nerves quivering from its influence.

On a day in early March, a bracing day of brilliant sky, clear air and
sharp west wind, Brand said to Henrietta when he left the office for
luncheon that probably he would not return in the afternoon. "I
think," he said, "that I shall go across to Staten Island and motor
down to Macfarlane's property and get a general idea of the site and
the surroundi