apparently torn to tatters all speed laws and appeared to onlookers as
a mere streak of color. After such a trip Bella's heightened spirits,
Henrietta thought, made her very lovely and bewitching, with the flush
in her cheeks, the sparkle in her eyes and her merry talk.

"She's young and gay-spirited and has so few pleasures," Henrietta
thought, regardless of the fact that she herself was younger and had
just as few, "that I feel awfully mean to object to anything that
seems so innocent. But it is reckless of him to go so fast, and this
accident last night--oh, I'm afraid it's dangerous. And then there's
Mildred--if he was engaged to anybody else I shouldn't think anything
about that; but--well, mother thinks it's all right and lovely of him
to give Bella a little outing now and then; and if it wasn't I suppose
he wouldn't do it."

But on this last point Henrietta was not without uneasiness. For
little rifts were beginning to appear in that perfect confidence she
had felt until recently in her employer. She had thought him the soul
of uprightness and honor, but in his business affairs, nearly all of
which passed through her hands, she knew that he had begun to make use
of the barest falsehoods and to practice evasions and tricks that made
her blush with shame to be the medium by which they were transmitted
to paper.

Simple, sturdy forthrightness being the backbone of Henrietta's
character, she could not help feeling as if she were an accomplice in
his shiftiness and untruths when she typed and mailed his letters.
She told herself that it was none of her affair, that she was no more
than a machine in the work she did for him and that to look after her
own morals was all that was incumbent upon her. Nevertheless, she was
a good deal disturbed about it on this bright morning.

"He seems so different from what he was a few months ago," she thought
with a sigh. "I don't understand why he should change so. I almost
begin to feel like trying to find another situation. But I mustn't
think about it now, for I can't afford yet to take any risks."

Her thoughts turned to another phase of Brand's character upon which
also she was beginning to have doubts. She did not see many people,
but a few bits of talk had reached her ears which made her wonder if
the man whose character she had believed to be almost ideally fine and
noble were not after all a devotee of sinister pleasures. She had
begun to feel conscious, after his las