If Dr. Surtaine had looked for explicit approval of his virtuous resolution, he was disappointed.  Yet Hal experienced, or tried to believe that he experienced, a certain factitious glow of satisfaction at this proof that his father was ready to give up an evil thing even without being fully convinced of its wrongfulness.  This helped the son to feel that, at least, his sacrifice had been made for a worthy affection.  Still, he had no word to say except that he must get to the office.  The Doctor left with gloom upon his handsome face.

With McGuire Ellis, Hal’s association had become even more difficult than with the Doctor.  Since his abrupt and unceremonious departure from the room of death, in the belief in Hal’s guilt, Ellis had maintained a purely professional attitude toward his employer.  For a time, in his wretchedness and turmoil of spirit, Hal had scarcely noticed Ellis’s withdrawal of fellowship, vaguely attributing his silence to unexpressed sympathy.  But later, when he broached the subject of Milly’s death, he was met with a stony avoidance which inspired both astonishment and resentment.  Sub-normal as he now was in nervous strength and tension, he shrank from having it out with Ellis.  But he felt, for the first time in his life, forlorn and friendless.

On his part McGuire Ellis brooded over a deep anger.  He was not a man to yield lightly of his best; but he had given to Hal, first a fine loyalty, and later, as they grew into closer association, a warm if rather reticent affection.  For the rough idealist had found in his employer an idealism not always as clear and intelligent as his own, yet often higher and finer; and along with the professional protectiveness which he had assumed over the younger man’s inexperience had come an honest admiration and far-reaching hopes.  Now he saw in his chief one who had betrayed his cause through a weak and selfish indulgence.  The clear-sighted journalist knew that the newspaper owner with a shameful secret binds his own power in the coils of that secret.  And fatally in error as he was as to the nature of the entanglement in which Hal was involved, he foresaw the inevitable effect of the situation upon the “Clarion.”  Moreover, he was bitterly disappointed in Hal as a man.  Had his superior “gone on the loose” and contracted a liaison with some woman of the outer world, Ellis would have passed over the abstract morality of the question.  But to take advantage of a girl in his own employ, and then so cruelly to leave her to her fate,—­there was rot at the heart of the man who could do that.  The excision of the offending “Relief Pills” ad. after the culmination of the tragedy, was simply a sop to hypocrisy.

Only once had Ellis made any reference to Milly’s death.  On the day of her funeral Max Veltman had disappeared, without notice.  A week later he reported for duty, shaken and pallid.

“Do you want to take him back?” Ellis inquired of Hal.