He sat there mute and implacable, with his fist, still big from the farm work it had done in early life, clenched upon the _News_, while Morton clanked the bars of the vault in fastening the place of treasure for the night, and slipped here and there behind his wire cage, pretending little duties to keep him from facing his employer when in such a mood.
It was after five o'clock when the surrey lurched into the filthy gutter, and when Harkness saw that Emily was not in it, he felt his rage with Garwood increase for depriving him thus of the pleasant hour to which he looked forward all the afternoon. He rode home in silence behind old Jasper who tried in his companionable way, by making his characteristic observations on men and things, to draw his master out of his moody preoccupation.
Harkness found his daughter at the supper table, and when he saw her, he at once yearned toward her with a great wish to give her such comfort as a mother would have supplied; but with something of his own stern nature, she held herself spiritually aloof; and he ate his cold meat, his fried potatoes, his peaches and cream and drank his tea without a word from her, beyond some allusions to the heat of the sultry day, the prospect of rain, and the need of it at his farm lying at the edge of town. Her face was white, but her eyes were not red or swollen, and she gave him no sign whether or not she knew of the blow that had been struck at the man she loved. He thought several times of telling her, or asking her about it, but he was always half afraid of her, and had submitted to her rule all the years when no one else was strong enough to rule him.
When supper was done, she disappeared, and as he strained his ears from his library where he was reading all alone, he heard her close a door upstairs and lock it. Later, when he went up in his stocking-feet, having left his boots downstairs in the habit he had brought out of the poverty of his boyhood into the comfort of his age, he paused a moment by her door, and raised his hand as if to knock; but he could not figure it out, he said to himself, and so changed his mind and went to bed, leaving it all to time.
When Emily went to her room, she sat at her dressing-table a moment looking at her own reflection, until her features became so strange that a fear of insanity haunted her, and then she half undressed and lay down upon her bed. She told herself that she could not sleep that night, and yet, after her first burst of tears she fell into the sound and natural slumber of grief-stricken youth with its vague apologetic hope that the whitened hair will show in the morning.