That night, she lay awake for a long time wondering about it; about Jay Rountree.
Miss Danforth never returned to the office. Ellen continued to take Mr. Rountree's letters. She found thirty-five, instead of twenty-five, dollars in her Saturday envelope; but Mr. Rountree never made any comment upon the nature of her services. He continued to confide to her, with complete detachment, his personal matters.
He was a tall, angularly handsome man of fifty with a strong, spare body and black hair without a trace of gray; but his face was deeply lined with unhappiness. He was a widower, having lost his wife the year after Jay was born. A tradition of her loveliness and likeableness lingered in the office, kept alive by Clancy, the white-haired usher.
"Faith, she was the beauty! Little—like that! And with the look in the eyes and the laugh on the lips. Like the boy has! And she had the high heart of him! And him" (this him was Mr. Rountree) "he loved her like he hates him" (this him was Jay).
"Why does he?" demanded Ellen.
"Sure, he niver got over the death of her. He holds it agin the boy."
"How can he?" asked Ellen. "The boy was a baby."
"But by her bearing him, he lost her."
This explanation never satisfied Ellen; it was too purely sentimental and substanceless. Something far more adequate was required to account for what she witnessed in the deep lines of John Rountree's unhappiness and his stubborn antagonism to his son.
She was employed in January and it was not until after the boat races in June that she saw Jay. When first she
