Henry looked up quickly to find his intended father-in-law overcome with grateful emotion, Henry couldn't stand it. He reached out quickly and touched one of J. B.'s hands, meaning thereby a lot—everything.
A little later the President of the Shell Point Land Company and Vice-President of Boland General, with twenty thousand a year for that combination job alone, walked out rather dizzily.
"I must ring up Billie, right away," he was thinking; but as he reached his desk remembered: "Holy smoke! I left that Stanfield report . . . well, I don't want it any more. It's his, anyway," he murmured hollowly, and began to ruminate upon the wonder he had just beheld, the wonder of sublime patience and measureless generosity.
"Meandering Moses, but he must have been surprised—keen to know where I'd got it. . . . Must have been madder than a hornet at somebody's treachery . . . but he never turned a hair. Knew perfectly well what I'd come in there for, and just calmly, patiently showed me where I was wrong, then—smothered me with kindness, with affection. Wouldn't that jar you now?"
It did jar Henry a good deal and the more he pondered it the more it jarred him; yet eventually his mind turned from it to the scanning of a pile of opened letters which Thorpe had placed upon his desk. One of these jarred him also, It was dated New York; it was on the letterhead of Barrett & Wendell, those brilliant lawyers who had been specially retained by Mr. Boland to represent the respondent in the case of Adolph Salzberg vs. The First National Bank; for Hornblower had carried it up—up to the Supreme Court of the United States. It had been a relief to
