When Mostyn got back to the farmhouse he found no one at home, the entire family being at church. He strolled about the lawn, smoked many cigars, and tried to read a Sunday paper on the porch. His old nervous feeling had him in its grasp. Try as he would to banish them, the things Saunders had told him swept like hot streams through his veins. Mitchell had doubled his fortune; Irene was now a richer heiress than ever; Delbridge was in great luck; and a shallow-pated woman, whom Mostyn both feared and despised, was threatening him with exposure. Mitchell, and other men of the old regime, laughed at the follies of youth, it was true, but a public scandal which would cripple business was a different matter in any man's eyes. Besides, the old man must be told of his intention to marry Dolly, and that surely would be the last straw, for all of Mitchell's intimate friends knew that the garrulous old man was counting on quite another alliance.
Mostyn heard the voices of the Drakes down the road, and to avoid them he went up to his room, and from a window saw them enter the gate. How wonderfully beautiful Dolly seemed as she walked by her mother! The girl was happy, too, as her smile showed. The others came into the house, but Dolly turned aside to a bed of flowers to gather some roses for the dinner-table. Bitterly he reproached himself. He had won her heart--there was no doubt of it; she was his--soul and body she was his, and with his last breath he would stand to her. From that day forth, in justice to her, he would cleanse his life of past impurities and be a new man. Delbridge, Mitchell, Henderson, Marie Winship--all of them--would be wiped out of consideration. He would get rid of Marie first of all. He would force her to be reasonable. He had made her no actual promises. She had known all along what to expect from him, and her present method was unfair in every way. He had paid her for her favors, and for aught he knew other men had done the same.
However, that did not lessen the woman's power. She might even make trouble before he got back to Atlanta--there was no counting on what a woman of her class would do. He would send her a telegram at once, stating that he would be down in the morning. But, no, that would only add to the tangible evidence against him. He would wait and see her as soon as possible after his arrival. Yes, yes, that would have to do, and in the mean time--the mean time-Mostyn paced the floor as restlessly as a caged tiger. There were mental pictures of himself as already a discredited, ruined man. Mitchell had turned from him in scorn; Saunders was placidly appealing to him to withdraw from a tottering firm, and old Jeff Henderson was going from office to office, bank to bank, whining, "I told you so!" At any rate--Mostyn tried to grasp it as a solace worth holding--there was Dolly, and here was open sunlight and a new and different life. But she would hear of the scandal, and that surely would alter the gentle child's view of him. Irene Mitchell would overlook such an offense if she gave it a second thought, but Dolly--Dolly was different. It would simply stun her.