and horror. Her shocked ears heard her employer denouncing
both Gordon and his caller and heard the rustle of the woman's dress
as she hurried across the room.

In her anger and indignation Mrs. Fenlow had rushed to the first door
that met her eyes, which chanced to be the one into Henrietta's room.
As she opened it she flung back over her shoulder at Brand, in a white
heat of scorn and wrath:

"You whited sepulchre! I'm done with you and all my friends shall know
what you are!"

She rushed past Henrietta without seeming to see her, and on through
the outer room into the corridor. The door into Brand's office was
left wide open and Henrietta saw him standing beside his desk, his
face so distorted with passion that for a moment she doubted that it
was he, and, apparently--and here again she could hardly believe her
eyes--shaking his fist at his departing visitor.

CHAPTER XVII

"WHICH SHOULD HAVE THE GIFT OF LIFE?"

There was a chorus of admiration and praise from all over the country
when Felix Brand's design for the capitol building was published. It
was everywhere recognized as a signal achievement, far in advance of
anything he had previously done, and he himself was acclaimed as one
of the most promising architects of the time and the most gifted that
America had yet produced. Other reproductions of his recent work,
business buildings, country houses, a church and a memorial structure,
were made public at about the same time and these and the capitol
building aroused so much interest that newspapers and magazines
published articles about him, with many illustrations of his work and
criticisms of his art that praised his present accomplishment in
glowing terms and prophesied he would do still greater things. In him,
it was declared, had come at last a great American architect, a man
of such originality, such skill and such sense of beauty and fitness
that, if he continued to give such rich fulfillment of his early
promise, he would soon create a distinctly American style of
architecture, infused with the national spirit and expressive of the
national ideals, worthy to take its place among the great
architectures of the world.

His secretary collected these articles and kept them for him to see
when he should return. For early in May, just before this round of
praise began, when she went one morning to the office she found a
letter from him saying that it had suddenly become necessary for him
to go