but I fear it will not be soon."

CHAPTER XIV

"THERE IS NOT ROOM FOR US BOTH"

"What shall I do?" Henrietta Marne exclaimed aloud as she looked
despairingly at the papers that littered her desk. "Here are half a
dozen letters, this morning, that ought to have his immediate
attention, to say nothing of all the others that I've got stacked away
in this drawer. Well, I'll just have to keep on as I've done before
and answer them in my own name, saying that Mr. Brand is temporarily
out of the city and as soon as he returns, etc. If he doesn't come
back soon," she grumbled on as she seated herself at the typewriter,
"I'll be as hysterical as Mildred is, though I'm not in love with
him."

She did what she could with the morning's mail, looking at one
envelope as she carefully put it away unopened, with more than a
little interest and curiosity, as she saw on its upper corner the firm
name of "Gordon and Rotherley." After she had finished the letter
writing she busied herself for an hour with such duties as it was
possible for her to take up.

The architect's suite of offices was on an upper floor of a high
building and from its windows one's vision soared far over the city
southward and westward. Henrietta paused now and then in the course of
her work to forget her anxieties in the sights and thoughts that
greeted her in that wide view. Down below, at the bottom of the street
canyons, people and vehicles were rushing back and forth.

But her eyes never rested long upon them. Rather, they traveled slowly
out over the mighty plain of roofs, broken by chimneys and spires, by
great, square buttes of buildings, by domes, turrets and towers,
across the bay, gleaming silver-white or glowing copper-red in the
sun, on to where the swelling hills of Staten Island loomed dimly
against the horizon.

In the brilliant sunshine a thousand plumes of cloud-white steam waved
gaily above the castellated plain of roofs and shook out their
tendrils in the breeze. "Peace pipes" Henrietta sometimes called them
to herself, as she thought of all that their fragile beauty, forever
dissolving and forever being renewed, meant to the city beneath them.
She liked to think of them, as she watched them curling and waving
upward toward the blue, as a sign and compact of earth's peace and
good-will.

Her bent of mind was much more practical than imaginative, but she
could never look out over this scene without feeling her nerves thrill
wi