IN THE SWIM.

IN THE SWIM

A Story of
Currents and Under-Currents
in Gayest New York.

By
Richard Henry Savage

Chicago and New York:
Rand, McNally & Company,
Publishers.

Copyright, 1898, by Richard Henry Savage.
All Rights Reserved.

CONTENTS.

BOOK I.
A RISING STAR.

BOOK II.
WITH THE CURRENT.

BOOK III.
ON A LEE SHORE.

IN THE SWIM.

BOOK I—A Rising Star.

CHAPTER I.

“YOUNG LOCHINVAR HAS COME OUT OF THE WEST.”

There was an expression of sullen discontent upon the handsome features of Mr. Harold Vreeland (gentleman unattached), as the inbound Hudson River train dashed along under the castled cliffs of Rhinebeck.

The afternoon was fair—the river of all rivers glittered gaily in the sun, and a dreamy peace rested on field and stream. But, the peace of this June afternoon of ’95 entered not into the young wayfarer’s soul.

The five years which the traveler from nowhere in particular had thrown away in the far wilds of the sporadic West had not yet robbed his chiseled features of the good looks which he had borne away from old Nassau.

And, though his glittering blue eye had been trained to a habitual impassiveness by much frontier poker, he had always abjured that Rocky Mountain whisky which “biteth like an adder.”

As he restlessly sought the smoking-car, after a vain struggle with the all too-evident immorality of a saucy French novel, several quickly thrilled spinsters followed his retreating form with warm glances of furtive admiration and half-suppressed sighs.

Vreeland’s stalwart figure was clearly reminiscent of well-played football and long straining at the oar. His well-set head was bravely carried, his eye was searching and even audaciously daring in its social explorations.

At twenty-seven he had not lost the fascination of his soft and perfectly modulated voice nor the winning insinuation of his too frequent smile. The chin was far too softly molded for an ascetic, and an expression of lurking insincerity flickered in the pleasure-loving curves of his handsome mouth.

But, shapely and glowing with manly vigor, he was a very “proper man-at-arms” in the battle of life, his sweeping cavalry mustache lending an air of decision to his sun-burned features.

Though he was perfectly dressed up to the memories of his never-forgotten “varsity” grade, the “wanderjahre” had given to him a little of that easy swing which is the gift of wandering on boundless prairies, long nights spent al fresco under the glittering dome of stars, and a close commune with the sighing pines of the West.

The shade of bitterness deepened upon his moody face as he noted a three-masted steam yacht swinging along up the river, with the elastic quivering throb of her quadruple compounded engines. This queenly vessel bore the private signal of one American citizen whose personal finances beggar the resources of many modern kings.

“Those are the cold-hearted fellows who rule America now with a rod of iron—the new money kings,” he growled. “Royal by the clink of the dollar, sovereign by the magic wand of monopoly, impregnable with the adamantine armor of trusts!”

And then, a lively hatred of the social grandees luxuriously grouped aft on that splendid yacht crept into his embittered soul.

He could see the Venetian awning which covered the clustered fair-faced patrician women from the fierce sun, which rudely burns by day.

And he knew, too, by distant rumors of that superb luxury in which the American women of the creed of the Golden Calf passed their happy days in a splendid and serene indolence, only lit up now and then with gleams of the passion play of high life.

“It’s no use to fight those fellows,” mused Vreeland, as he carefully trimmed a cigar. “They have come to stay, and I must try and fall into the train of some one of them.”

He looked back at all those unprofitable years spent beyond the rugged Rockies. There was a sense of shame and resentment as he recalled the shabby career of his talented father.

“Thank God, I am now alone in the world, ‘with no one nigh to hender!’” he bitterly reflected, unconsciously quoting Lowell’s “Zekle and Huldy.”

The train had rushed on past Poughkeepsie, and the parade music from West Point floated sweetly across the cool river as the train halted at Garrison’s for a few moments, before he had morosely reviewed all the dismal events which brought him a lonely stranger back to New York.

Erastus Vreeland, a lawyer of no mean accomplishment, had destined his only son for the bar.

The elder Vreeland was a human spider, who had finally gravitated downward into the exercise of only the meaner craft of his much-abused profession.

For long years, in his little office on William Street he had legally carried on the intrigues of a daring band of clients who rightly should have ornamented the Academy of Belles-Lettres of New York at Sing Sing.

During the life of his hoodwinked wife, Vreeland père led a double existence of more or less moral turpitude, and, at last, a shameless and successful coup of rascality aroused the ire of a great financial company.

It was his “notice to quit,” and after the death of his wife, Erastus Vreeland “swung round the distant circle,” often followed by the déclassé

lawyer.

Omaha, Leadville, Salt Lake, Los Angeles, and other Western cities finally knew his fox-like cunning and gradually weakening grip.

A political affray, the result of a heated election in Montana, had been the occasion of the elder Vreeland’s sudden taking off.

And so, the man who had never learned the homely adage that “corruption wins not more than honesty,” slept far away from his fathers on the rocky hillsides of Helena, in wild Montana. It was a miserable summation of failures.

The hegira of the father had left the son stranded in life at the start upon his finishing the four years at Princeton which had made him an expert in all the manly arts save any definite plan of money-getting.

A still self-deceiving man, Erastus Vreeland had hopefully invited his son to share the suggested exile, and thus, the plan of the law course for the junior was perforce abandoned. It had not been long till father and son drifted coldly apart.

The mean, shabby moral nature of the demoralized elder could not long impose upon the quick-witted youth. The slights of the bench, the slurs of the bar, the wasp-like thrusts of a bold frontier press, all proved that the “trail of the serpent” followed on after the talented weakling whose professional honor was never proof against gold or gain secured from either side.

And so, with only a hypocritical pretense of a certain lingering friendly feeling, the two men had finally parted, dividing a few hundred dollars which were the remains of a retainer in a case, which deftly went wrong on its trial, sold out, to the benefit of lawyer Vreeland’s adversary. Then came the bloody finale—and, and—exit Vreeland pater!

Harold Vreeland sighed in disgust as he recalled the five lost years of his golden youthful promise.

“It’s all rot,” he muttered, “this idea that the loafer life of the far West gives either scope, strength, or courage to any man. It is all mere barbarism, and only a windy discounting of a future which never comes. A long, bootless struggle with the meaner conditions of life.”

He recalled his varied experiences as notary public, deputy county clerk, cashier of a shoddy bank—a concern which “folded its Arabian tents” in six months.

Real estate dealer he had been in several aspiring “boom towns,” and also, secretary of many frontier “wind” corporations, whose beautifully engraved stock certificates were now either carried around in the pocketbooks of dupes or else stuck up in Western saloons, to the huge edification of the ungodly.

This strange wandering life had made him a fox in cunning, though not as yet a ravening wolf, for there was little to prey upon in those dreary distant Occidental preserves. But, his fangs were well sharpened for the fray.

He realized, as the lights of Haverstraw gleamed out “beyond the swelling tide,” that he was as yet without any definite plan of operations.

A singular incident, illustrative of the roughly good-humored social code of the wild West had caused him to seek the city of Manhattan.

The political clique which had coolly plotted the murder of his crafty father, with a last generous twinge of conscience, had sent all the private papers of the defunct lawyer over to his son, who was listlessly engaged at the time in endeavoring, on a net cash capital of a hundred and fifty dollars, to float a ten million dollar corporation, in order to utilize certain waste energy of those foaming falls of the Spokane River, which have so long caused both the salmon and the Indians a great deal of unnecessary trouble.

And then, young Vreeland wearily explored those ashes of life—the “papers in the case” of the defunct.

The unwelcome discovery of many evidences of his father’s shame and the revealing of all that secret life which had sent his patient mother to the shadowy bourne of heartbroken wives, was somewhat mitigated by the discovery of a paid-up policy of ten thousand dollars in the great “Acqueduct Life Insurance of New York City.”

There was, as usual, some strings and filaments hanging out loosely knotted up, and it had been a labor of months, involving a correspondence of some acerbity, for him to obtain letters of administration, close up his father’s “estate,” and depart to Gotham to receive a check for seven thousand dollars in full settlement of the claim.

On the road over from Spokane, Mr. Harold Vreeland had carefully counted all his ships. He had even gone over all his own abortive attempts at opening any useful career, and so, on this summer evening, he gloomily felt how poorly prepared he was to fight the battle of life against the keen competition and increasing pressure of his peers in New York City.

“If I had only my father’s profession, I would have a chance to get in among these fellows, and I would soon have my share of the gate money,” he growled.

“But to take a place in the line of mere drudges, to sink down into the death in life of a hall room and a cheap boarding-house. Once planted there, I am there forever. And I have not a friend in the whole world!”

His mental harvest had only been one of husks, and he keenly felt the absence of any definite calling pour accrocher.

Suddenly his eye caught the gleam of a sunset upon a dozen drifting, glittering white sails on the river.

They all seemed to float on serenely, borne along upon the broad tide, with no visible man’s hand to guide.

“I will drift a while,” he murmured. “I have a few thousand dollars. Something will surely turn up. If it does not,” he resolutely said, “then, I will turn it up myself.”

“There are women here, too—women with hearts of flame, and who are to be won. I was a fool ever to go out to the frontier. Perhaps—”

And his mind reverted to a lucky college chum who had married a woman nearly two generations older than himself, but a well-preserved Madame “Midas.”

“By Jove! anything is better than this beastly poverty,” he mused. “Even that.”

“This is no era for poor men. Poverty is the only crime nowadays.”

His cynicism was broken off by the approach of two men, who rose to rejoin friends in the train as it dashed along toward the Bronx River.

As they came up the smoking-car, Vreeland easily recognized Fred Hathorn, the stroke of the college crew in which he had once won hard-fought honors for the orange.

There was no mistaking the easy luxury which exhaled from Mr. Fred Hathorn of the great firm of Hathorn and Potter, bankers and brokers of dingy Wall Street, a man who had already arrived!

The first crucial glance of rapid inspection was not lost on Vreeland, as Hathorn, in an easy way cried: “Hello, Hod Vreeland! What brings you over here?”

With a perfunctory politeness, Mr. James Potter halted and calmly acknowledged Hathorn’s listless introduction.

The little blonde man-about-town, however, gazed longingly ahead at the car where certain fair dames now awaited their escorts.

Jimmy Potter was born to “no end of easy money,” and so his dashing senior partner’s genius for finance was strongly buttressed by the whirlwind of cash which clustered around Jimmy Potter’s lucky head.

All sorts of financial bees seemed to swarm around Potter and quietly settle in his hive.

“What’s the use of making a row?” he often remarked. “Sit still, and what you want in life will come to you.” Mr. James Potter of New York was an Epicurean disciple.

The blood mounted to Vreeland’s forehead as he noted all the deprecating courtesy of Hathorn’s welcome.

“Damn him! I’ll give him a bit of a bluff,” he quickly decided, under the inspiration of some bold, familiar spirit.

There was an air of quiet comfort in the careless response of Vreeland.

“I have just fallen into a good bit of money by my father’s death, and so have come on here to enjoy myself. I may spend a couple of years abroad.”

Vreeland then blessed that daring, familiar spirit which so saucily suggested his “cheeky” retort, as the man who had been his chum and fellow of several Greek letter societies stopped short. “Wait for me at the station, old fellow. We are bothered yet with some ladies. They leave at the station. Then we will dine later at the club and talk over old times a bit. You’ll come, too, won’t you, Potter?”

Jimmy Potter carelessly nodded an assent from sheer laziness, and then the two members of the jeunesse dorée

, passed on into the boudoir car.

There was a twinkle of triumph in Vreeland’s eye as he sank back in his seat.

“I got a dinner out of you at any rate, Mr. Snob,” he gleefully chuckled.

And, highly elated, he decided then and there, to vary his first plan of drifting with the tide, and to cautiously put his oar in a bit where it would help him on.

His step was as light as the tread of a panther when he leaped out of the car at Forty-second Street.

“I’ll have a stolen glance at their women,” he quickly resolved. “Perhaps they may give dinners, too.”

And just then, there seemed to be the twinkle of a little star of Hope lighting up that devious, unknown path which he was so soon to tread.

“I’ll let him give me a Club card,” he mused, as the wearied passengers hurried along to brave the din of importunate jehus.

He was wondering how much of a social show he could make at need with his slender fortune, when the two men slowly approached with three “shining ones” of the golden strata of womanly New York.

“These people are all in the swim,” he murmured. “I will find the way! I am as good as any of them.”

And as he raised his eyes, he met the glances of the imperial-looking woman who was Fred Hathorn’s companion.

The lady’s eyes rested for a moment upon the handsome stranger, and then fell with a peculiar abruptness.

“If that woman plays any star part in his life, I will try and take her away from him,” resolved Vreeland, whose whole soul was now thrilling with the beautiful woman’s sudden, startled admission of interest in a passing stranger. The wine of life stirred in the young wanderer’s veins.

His audacious, familiar sprite suggested the profound bow which was Mr. Harold Vreeland’s first salutation upon the outskirts of the “Four Hundred.”

He had adroitly managed to convey the respectful homage of the salutation by his velvety eyes to the very person intended, for, while Jimmy Potter was placidly listening to the brilliant chatter of two very vivacious rosebuds, Mrs. Elaine Willoughby turned to Hathorn:

“Fred, who is your Western friend?” she asked, with an assumed carelessness.

It was by sheer good luck that Hathorn, who was watching the young millionairess whom he was soon to marry, answered with an unusual warmth:

“An old college chum—Vreeland of Princeton, and a rattling good fellow.”

Fred Hathorn eyed with a certain qualminess the easy aplomb of his Crœsus partner, as Jimmy Potter pressed closely to the side of Hathorn’s destined bride, Miss Moneybags.

That young lady was destined to play the rôle of Queen of Diamonds in the ambitious young banker’s life.

He had resolutely set up the motto, “Aut Cæsar, aut nullus,” and he was just a bit shy of the beloved James trifling with his dashing fiancée

.

“All sorts of things happen in New York,” mused the agnostic Hathorn, as he handed the ladies into a waiting victoria and then turned to rejoin the man who more than ever had now decided to paddle a bit, as well as to drift on with the tide of fortune.

There was a glow of satisfaction burning in the Western adventurer’s heart as, half an hour later, he noted Hathorn dash off his potent signature behind his guest’s name on the visitor’s book of the Old York Club. It was the open sesame to the regions of the blest—young New York par excellence.

The trio adjourned to the billiard room, and, then and there, Vreeland for the first time tasted the famous club cocktail.

He was “living up to his blue china,” as he gravely bowed when Hathorn gave him a two-weeks’ card.

“I’ll have it renewed for you, old fellow,” lightly remarked the young banker.

“Pity our waiting list is so long. We must try to get your name advanced, by hook or crook.”

While Hathorn departed to give his personal orders for the dinner, Jimmy Potter drew apart to glance over a handful of cards, letters and billets

d’amour which a grave old club steward had handed to him.

He critically selected two, the missives of “she who must be obeyed,” and then carelessly slipped the fardel of the others into the oblivion of his breast pocket.

He sat there, the ferret-eyed young millionaire, glowering after Hathorn’s retreating form. “Pity to see Alida VanSittart wasted on that cold human calculating machine! Fred is as indurated as a steel chisel.”

The little child of Pactolus felt his tiny veins still tingling with the exhalant magnetism of the budding heiress whom Hathorn had selected as a second spoke in that wheel of fortune of which the unconscious Jimmy was the main stay.

The aforesaid young patrician, Miss Alida, was “divinely tall” and of a ravishing moonlight beauty, two elements of ensnaring witchery to the dapper, blasé

young Midas, whose little patent leathers had pattered vainly along after the stride of that elastic young goddess.

The alert Vreeland grimly eyed the eager Jimmy Potter, and noted the tell-tale quiver of the youth’s slim fingers as he fished out the two “star” leaders of his evening mail.

“I would like just one night with that chap at poker, with no limit,” gravely mused Vreeland, with an inspirational sigh. “He looks soft.”

While the parvenu “sized up” his man, he was aware of a hum of murmured comment at a table near him.

Two men were following with their envious eyes the tall form of the fortunate Hathorn—“the very rose and expectancy of the state,” as he called his myrmidons around him.

“Lucky devil is Hathorn,” quoth A. “Saw him get out of the train to-night with Mrs. Wharton Willoughby. Potter over there and a gang of girls have been up at Lakemere. He still holds her fast.”

Quoth B: “He has a regular run of nigger luck. Elaine Willoughby is the Queen of the Street. Her account must be worth a cool hundred thousand a year to the firm. And here drops in to him, the whole VanSittart fortune, a cool ten millions.”

Vreeland started as A rejoined moodily: “I had hoped that some other fellow might have a chance to make the running at Lakemere, now that Hathorn is rangé; but it really seems to be ‘a petit ménage

à trois’ so far.”

And B, thereat, enviously growled: “He ought to cling to the generous woman who made him. I always thought Hathorn would finally marry her. She trusts him with her chief account, the —— deals.” Vreeland cursed the caution which cost him that one keyword “but, there’s a mystery.”

It was with a wolfish hunger for “more sweetness and light” that the unmoved Vreeland deftly arose and followed his host and Potter to a fair upper chamber of that narrow-chested corner club house on Fifth Avenue in the thirties, at whose critic-infested windows both Miss Patricia and Miss Anonyma “give a side glance and look down.”

The royal road to fortune which had led the ambitious Hathorn “on the heights” seemed to be clear of mist now to his hypocritical visitor.

Was there room for another chariot in the race? The familiar sprite was busy with daring suggestions.

If a rich woman—not of an age très tendre—had made one man, some other woman of that ilk might be waiting with a willing heart in the babel of Gotham for the shapely young Lochinvar come out o’ the West.

The fires of hope leaped through his veins.

As they seated themselves to the enjoyment of that particular clear turtle soup which is justly the pride of the club chef

, both host and guest were adroitly playing at cross-purposes.

Hathorn, with a secret avidity entirely New Yorkish, determined to find out all the details of Vreeland’s financial windfall.

He had a vague idea that the outlandish wilds of Montana were stuffed with copper mines, gold ledges, silver leads, cattle ranches, and “all sorts of things that might be gotten hold of,” i. e., other people’s money.

And if this placid and lamb-like blonde guest had “dropped into a good thing,” then by a judicious use of a regulated social hospitality, Hathorn now proposed to “drop into that same good thing.”

An uneasy fever seems to burn in a New York man’s blood from the moment when he knows his neighbor to have an unprotected penny.

The keen-eyed Vreeland minutely examined his old chum’s “get-up,” and quickly decided that he would closely copy this easily graceful “glass of fashion and mould of form.”

He had already resolved that he would also try to make a “run in” at Lakemere, if the cards came his way.

“I could always give Fred ten points at billiards and twenty with the women, and then do him every time,” mused Vreeland. “He only plays a sure-thing game.”

Vreeland’s own motto had always been “De l’audace! Toujours de l’audace!” and in fact, the root of his quarrel with his own cowardly father had been the sniveling, self-deprecatory caution of that “Old-man-afraid-of-his-record.”

The little dinner was “très-soigné

,” for Mr. Fred Hathorn did everything “decently and in order,” and it calmly proceeded to the gastronomic delight of a pleasure-loving man who had long nibbled at jerked elk and biscuits à

la Mike Muldoon.

The wines, with their soft suggestion and insinuating succession, soon led them up to the point where Fred felt that he “had his man about right.”

The shame-faced Potter, with his mandatory billets from “She,” burning under his waistcoat, soon mumbled several iron-clad excuses of unnecessary mendacity about “seeing a man,” and then gladly escaped, hustling himself into the hack with all the fond expectancy of a man who bought quite unnecessary diamond necklaces loyally and cheerfully for that queen of bright eyes, Miss Dickie Doubleday of the Casino.

When the old college comrades were left alone, even the shaven servitor having fled, over the cigars of the incomparable Bock & Co., the two young men drifted into a considerable rapprochement.

The old friendly days came back. Château

Yquem, Pontèt Canet, fine Burgundy, and Pommery Sec have often mended many a torn thread in the web of friendship, as well as patched up the little rift in the Lute of Love. Your sweet devil-born spirit of champagne always stands smiling at the crossroads of life.

“And, both reviewed the olden past—

Full many a friend, in battle slain,

And all the war that each had known,

Rose o’er them once again.”

The dinner was a “howling success” from the varying points of view of each sly schemer and his would-be dupe.

Hathorn smiled knowingly when Vreeland carelessly remarked that he was not familiar with the dry details of Montana investments.

“I leave all that drudgery to my lawyers,” he airily remarked, with all the nerve of a Napoleon Ives.

“I must try and work his account in our direction,” mused the ardent devotee of business, while Vreeland gracefully bowed his thanks, when Hathorn rejoined:

“Mrs. Willoughby? Yes. A wonderful woman. Prettiest place at Irvington. She entertains a great deal. I’ll ask her if I may present you. She’s probably the heaviest operator on the Street of all our rich women.”

It was long after midnight when the two chums separated.

Their strange life orbits had intersected for the first time since they sang “Lauriger Horatius” together in an honest, youthful chorus.

Mr. Harold Vreeland now felt intuitively that his “bluff” was a good one. He had always battled skillfully enough in the preliminary skirmishes of his conflict with the world, but he felt that the scene of action had been poorly chosen.

Hard-hearted and pitiless, he cursed the memory of his corrupt and inefficient father, as he directed his lonely steps to the “Waldorf,” to register his name as a permanent guest.

His heart beat no throb warmer in acknowledgment of the seven thousand dollars’ windfall which was to bring his star up from an obscure western declination to a brilliant eastern right ascension.

He delivered his luggage checks to the night clerk of New York’s greatest hotel, and proudly inscribed himself as a member of the “swell mob” filling that painted Vanity Fair.

A strange fire burned within his veins. He recalled Fred Hathorn’s final semi-confidential remark: “Do you know anything of handling stocks? If you do, we could put you up to a good thing or two on the Street now.”

It was no lie. The glib story which had fallen easily from his lips of the six-months’ exciting experience in which he acted as dummy cashier for a San Francisco kite-flying “Big Board” firm of brokers during a sporadic revival of the “Comstock craze.”

He had learned then how to “wipe out a margin” as deftly as the veriest scamp who ever signed a fraudulent “statement” for reckless man or sly, insinuating woman.

He had artfully led Fred Hathorn on to describe the unique position of Mrs. Elaine Willoughby among the bravest of the swim. The New Yorker was over-eager in his fencing, and so Vreeland easily gathered him in.

Lighting a cigar, he strolled along the silent Fifth Avenue, arranging with quick decision his preliminary maneuvers.

“This lovely woman who has built up Hathorn must surely have a vacancy in her heart at present, vice Hathorn, ‘transferred for promotion’ to head the VanSittart millions.”

“It’s a good play to come in between them now. He will never suspect my game, but I’ll block his little scheme some way, unless he carries me along upward. He evidently wishes to be rid of the old rapprochement now, and yet not lose her stock business. By Jove! I would like to cut in there.”

He strolled along toward the “Circassia,” that pink pearl of all sumptuous apartment palaces, and eagerly reconnoitered the superb citadel of Elaine Willoughby’s social fortifications.

“Lakemere, a dream of beauty,” he murmured. “I’ll soon get into that same gilded circle, and work the whole set for all they are worth.”

He plumed himself upon the approving glance of the beautiful brown eyes of the mistress of Lakemere as she had swept by on Fred Hathorn’s arm.

“She accepted my bow as an evident homage to her own queenly self,” mused Vreeland, who was no dabster at reading the ways of the mutable woman heart.

“Yes, she is my first play. I must burn my ships and now go boldly in for ‘High Life.’ I’ll risk it. Carlisle said: ‘There are twenty millions of people in Britain—mostly fools.’ Among the gilded fools of Gotham, some one easy mark must be waiting for me on general principles. I’ll take the chances and play the queen for my whole stack of chips.”

He wandered homeward, after narrowly inspecting the “Circassia,” and unconsciously attracting the attention of Daly, the Roundsman, the bravest and cheeriest member of the Tenderloin police.

Lights still gleamed from a splendid second-floor apartment above him, where a lovely woman, royal in her autumnal beauty, gazed out at the night.

Elaine Willoughby sighed as she turned away. “If I had told Hathorn all, he might have made me his wife. Alida—” Her face hardened as she choked down a sob. “My God! if I only knew! I must have Endicott renew his search.”

In some strange way, the handsome Western stranger returned to haunt her disturbed mind. “He looks like a man brave, gallant, and tender,” she sighed, as she forgot Hathorn, who, in his bachelor apartments was now musing upon the ways and means to hold Elaine Willoughby’s heart after he had wedded Miss Millions.

CHAPTER II.

THE DRIFT OF A DAY IN NEW YORK CITY.

Sparkling lances of golden morning sunbeams broke and shivered on the fretted golden roof of the Synagogue by Central Park’s eastern wall of living green.

New York was astir once more, and the daily burden of life settled down again upon myriads of galled shoulders. The rumbling trains had rattled away the blue-bearded mechanic, the pale-faced clerk, and the ferret-eyed anæmic shop girl to their daily “demnition grinds” long before Elaine Willoughby opened her eyes, in the Circassia.

“A breeze of morning moved,” and down the Mall early pedestrians wandered, while the bridle bits rang out merrily on the park cantering paths.

Sedentary citizens had strolled along into the leafy shades for a peep at a cherished book, or a glance at the horrible of horribles in the “New York Whirl,” while the recumbent tramp shook himself and hopefully scuttled forth from his grassy lair to search for vinous refreshment and to craftily elude the inexorable “sparrow cop.”

New York City was awakened in the inverse order of rank, and the passion play of Gotham was on once more.

The splintered lances danced over the fragrant God’s acres of the great pleasure ground to the palace on Central Park west, and as they were gaily reflected from a silver-framed Venetian mirror, they recalled Mrs. Wharton Willoughby to that luxurious life of Gotham in whose fierce splendors there is no rest.

For as burning a flame throbs in the heated maelstrom of Manhattan as in any human eddy of the whole distracted globe.

The congestion of careworn faces had filled the town below Canal Street with its battling disciples of Mammon long before Mrs. Wharton Willoughby stepped into her brougham to seek the counsels of the one man on earth whose integrity was her rock of Gibraltar, Judge Hiram Endicott, her legal adviser and trustee.

For the silver-framed mirror had relentlessly reflected the traces left by the vigil of the night before.

It was the morning after the storm, and no calm had yet soothed the troubled soul of the woman whom thousands envied.

With a fine Gallic perception, Justine, the black-browed, slyest of French maids, had remarked: “Madame n’ a pas bien dormi?” as she arranged the filmy coffee service of Dresden eggshell.

Elaine Willoughby was sullen, but resolute, as she arranged the details of her morning interview by the Ariel magic of her private telephone.

The ceaseless activity of the Street compelled the veiled “queen” to have her own “intelligence department” adjoining her boudoir, a nook with its special wires leading to Hiram Endicott’s office and even to his sober Park Avenue home, and its talking wire also extended to the private office of Frederick Hathorn, Esq., of Hathorn and Potter, and another handy wire leading to the lair where the cashier of the Chemical Bank scanned the ebb and flow of Mrs. Elaine Willoughby’s fortune.

A stock ticker and dial telegraph, binding the central office of the Western Union to the Circassia, were always stumbling blocks to the insidious Justine, who earned a vicious golden wage in piping off every movement of the queen to the adroit Fred Hathorn.

On this particular morning, Hathorn was disturbed at heart as he answered Justine’s spying warning of Mrs. Willoughby’s early departure for her downtown coign of vantage—that room in Judge Endicott’s offices in the Hanover Bank building, which was terra incognita even to him. The corner of Pine and Nassau was an Ehrenbreitstein.

For Hathorn’s acutest schemes had never yet given him the open sesame to the room adjoining Hiram Endicott’s study bearing the simple inscription “Office Willoughby Estate.”

There, Madame Elaine was safe, even from him.

He grumbled: “I don’t half like the way Elaine eyed Alida VanSittart yesterday. There was a storm signal in my lady’s glances. If she should draw away her account—”

He shuddered, for he was well overdrawn in his personal relations with Mr. Jimmy Potter, who had just meekly slunk into his office, with quivering nerves and much pink-eyed indications of the aftermath of “a cosy little evening at Miss Dickie Doubleday’s.”

“I must keep her well in hand till I pull off the marriage. Sugar is on the jump, too. There’s a half million if I follow her sure lead.

“By God! I would give ten years of my life to know who posts her in that saccharine article of prime necessity. I will give her something to interest her. Yes; the very thing! I’ll run in Hod Vreeland there.

“He is a new face, and she may forget to harry Alida in the new man’s initiation at Lakemere. And I’ll go up and see her this afternoon myself.”

When he had telephoned his carefully-worded message to Justine, to be delivered to Mrs. Willoughby on her return, he ordered a basket of orchids to precede his call at the Circassia, and then, with a fine after-thought, telegraphed “Mr. Harold Vreeland, Hotel Waldorf,” to await his call on important business after dinner.

“If I am going to use Vreeland, I may as well put him into play right now,” cheerfully mused Hathorn, as he lit a Prince of Wales cigarette.

“I can pay that devil Justine a bit extra to watch Hod Vreeland’s little game with Elaine.

“A bit of healthy flirtation may cause her to forget Alida shining her down.

“Whirlwind speculator as she is, the Willoughby is one of Eve’s family, after all. ‘But yet a woman!’ I wonder if—”

His reverie was cut off by the entrance of Mr. Jimmy Potter, who calmly remarked: “Sugar is going hellward! You had better get out and see about where we will land!”

Mr. Fred Hathorn had unwittingly passed one of the cross-roads of life and a knowledge of his proposed actions would have been Balm of Gilead to the anxious soul of Harold Vreeland, who was busily engaged with the great tailor, Bell—manufacturer of gentlemen à

la mode.

The crafty Vreeland’s heart would have bounded had he realized how true was the debonnair Jimmy Potter’s one golden maxim. “Hold on quietly, and what you want will come around to you!”

The arched doors of the Circassia, the superb gateways of Lakemere were being slowly swung for him, by the scheming man who cunningly proposed to divert the Montana bonanza into the coffers of Hathorn and Potter.

Mr. Potter, in his pink-eyed awakening from a night’s folly, was now standing at the bar of the Savarin, gloomily reflecting upon certain rashnesses of his own on the preceding evening.

These little extravaganzas, greatly to the profit and delight of Miss Dickie Doubleday, had been all unsolicited by that sinewy-hearted young beauty.

“The biggest fool in the world is the man who fools himself!” sadly ejaculated Potter, as he shed his burden of care with the half dollar dropped for a “high ball.”

He crept back to watch Fred Hathorn battling in the Sugar pit, with all the admiration of a fainéant

for an energetic man.

“Great fellow, Fred!” proudly reflected Mr. Jimmy, with one last wormwood pang for the robbery of that young Diana, Alida VanSittart.

“She outclasses him—ranks him—clean out of sight!” sadly mourned Potter. “Now, if I was only clear of the Doubleday, I might—”

But, an aching head cut short his half-formed determination.

“I suppose that she is like all the others!” sighed Potter.

“These New York girls’ hearts are like a ball of string, unwind the thing—and—there’s nothing left!”

Mrs. Elaine Willoughby, on her way down town, had stolen another glimpse at her own disturbed face. The crise des nerfs had clearly brought out to her the presaged passing of her beauty.

The little hand glass of the brougham told her, with brutal abruptness, that the face she was gravely studying must pale before the moonlight radiance of Alida VanSittart.

Face to face with her own sorrow, she saw the truth at last. Was it envy of the nymph-like girl or a dull hatred of Hathorn, for his cold ingratitude, which racked her heart?

“Perhaps, if I had told him all,” she murmured, “I will find out the lost link of my life yet, and there must be a man somewhere who would prove worthy of a woman’s whole confidence.

“One who could wander in le Jardin Secret, by my side!”

As she studied her own face, with a needless self-deprecation, there came back to her the handsome Western stranger.

“Perhaps,” she dreamily said, as her mind wandered away to the great dim Sierras, “uplifting their minarets of snow,” “he may have caught their majestic secret of truth and lofty freedom.”

And—she, too, drifted on to a cross-road of life.

Elaine Willoughby had finished her inspection of the counterfeit presentment afforded by the little mirror.

Though matters of both head and heart claimed all the exercise of her mental powers on this morning, she was lost in a vexing comparison of her own personal charms with those of Alida VanSittart.

The lady had never fathomed the reason why the wise Thales had formulated his priceless proverb of three words into the cramped diction, “Man! Know Thyself!”

The antique sage wisely refrained from saying, “Woman! Know Thyself!” for, far beyond the clouds wrapping the misty ruins of Greece, Rome and the Nile, the woman of yesterday never had been the woman of to-day, nor her chameleon substitute of to-morrow.

The only thing unvarying in womanhood, is its infinite emotional variety. Not one in a million of that charming sex has ever mastered the secret of their strange enigmas of varying loves, and the one only anchored feeling of motherhood.

The divine Shakespeare’s words, “’Tis brief! Aye—as woman’s love!” are supplemented by the great-hearted Mrs. Browning’s feminine lines, “Yes! I answered you last night. No! this morning, sir, I say!”

Elaine Willoughby did not know herself. She resolutely put away the reason why she ignored all the hawk-eyed young Gibson beauties of Irvington, Tarrytown, and Ardsley, to nourish a resentment alone against that slim Diana, Alida VanSittart.

Woman of the world, throned upon a golden pedestal of wealth—mistress of secrets that would shake the financial world—she had also enjoyed the homage of men long enough to know every one of her own good points.

There had been hours of triumph, too. For, after all, a woman’s heart beat behind the silken armor of her Worth robes.

Still in the bloom of a meridian beauty, no one in Gotham knew but Hiram Endicott that her years were thirty-seven.

Her brunette loveliness of face was accentuated by the molded symmetry of her Venus de Milo form.

Men knew her only as the childless widowed chatelaine of Lakemere, the inheritor of a vast fortune hazily dating from Colorado.

A few cold words from that oracle, Judge Hiram Endicott, had dispelled any doubts as to the authenticity of the late Wharton Willoughby.

The checks of the woman whom all had failed to win were considered among the cognoscenti as gilt-edged as Treasury Certificates.

The grave glances of her sole attorney and trustee were also a no thoroughfare to prying gossipers, and it was only by a long series of stealthy financial sleuth work that the financial world discovered both “sugar” and “oil” to be as granite buttresses to the unshaken pyramid of her solid wealth. On the Street she was a whirlwind operator—with “inside tips!”

As the brougham swung along through Pine Street, Mrs. Willoughby caught a single glimpse of Fred Hathorn, eager-eyed, and hurrying to the Stock Exchange.

The man of thirty-five had risen to be a clubman—a yachtsman of renown—a man of settled fortune—and a social lion, too, in the five years since she had opened the gates of her heart to admit the handsome struggling youth, then paddling feebly in Wall Street’s foaming breakers.

She leaned back with a sigh. Hathorn’s sudden apparition had opened her eyes to the reason of her dull hatred of the millionaire fiancée

.

“He is the reason why I hate that girl,” she murmured, with misty lashes, and an old saw came back to her.

“It is hard to look out on a lover’s happiness through another man’s eyes!”

In the gilded throng at Lakemere, the proprietary endearments of Frederick Hathorn had galled her stormy soul. She knew not that the parvenu broker was only publicly sealing, beyond a doubt, the projected union which would make him the equal in capitalistic reserve of that easy-going Son of Fortune, Potter, to whom all things came around—even Miss Dickie Doubleday’s bills.

A ray of light lit up her darkened heart.

“Alida is innocent of wrecking my happiness. She could know nothing. For I have been silent! And if I held the ladder, can I blame him for climbing? He needs me no longer.

“I have been only a means to an end. Alida will be the last. And then, Frederick Hathorn, Esquire, is safely in the swim!”

A sudden conviction of the uselessness of her affectation of a semi-maternal interest in the fortunes of the hardened man of thirty-five told her that she had left all the doors open to him.

For there was that in her own life, dating back to her girlhood, which she had never even revealed to her half-lover protégé.

With her rich womanly nature sorely shaken, her tender dark eyes drooping, she now owned to the hope, now fled forever, that Hathorn would light the beacon of love in her lonely heart. “I have not trusted him,” she murmured. “He owes me nothing, nothing but gratitude.”

Too late, she saw that mere gratitude does not kindle into love, and a sense of her own lack of frankness sealed her accusing lips.

“I can not blame Hathorn!” she murmured. “It is my own fault. I told him the truth, but—not the whole truth!”

Still, she suffered from the shattering of flattering hopes long secretly cherished, and saw now the marriage of her financial éleve as a future bar to the confidential relations which had linked him to her fortunes with golden chains.

“They will go on and play the game of life brilliantly without me—these two, whom I have unwittingly brought together. I will go on alone—now—to the end—unless I can find the lost thread.

“Endicott must reopen the search! I will spend a half million—and—that other heart shall know mine!” She was lost in the memories of a buried past.

As she entered the vestibule of the office building, a grave manly voice aroused her.

“I thought that you should know this,” whispered Hugh Conyers, of the New York Clarion. “It has just come over the wires from Washington.

“I was going up to tell the Judge, and have him send for you. You will have a busy day.”

The startled woman read a slip which was the burden of the lightning Ariel which had set “Sugar soaring hellward” in the classic diction of James Potter, Esq.

“Hugh!” gasped the Queen of the Street, as she drew him into a dark corner, “can I never reward you for your loyalty? Is there nothing I can do for you?”

The Knight of the Pen laughed gaily, as he pocketed the yellow slip. “Not now! Lady Mine! You paid in advance when you saved Sara’s life by sending her away to Algiers! I’m off to the office. When you can give two respectably poor people an evening, send for us, that’s all—but, we want you all to ourselves!

“If there is anything more, I will come around. Shall I tell this to Hathorn?” His eyes were fixed eagerly upon her.

There was a slight ring of hardness in her voice, as she hastily said:

“Not a word to him, in future. He is going to marry—and—go away for a time. I will handle this line alone—after this—only report to the Judge. He is my Rock of Gibraltar.”

She disappeared in the elevator with a hard little laugh. For she was trying to make light of the blow which had told upon her lonely heart.

The newspaper man edged his way up Nassau Street in a brown study.

“Coming events cast their shadows before,” he muttered. “I wonder if she will ever know? Some day, perhaps.”

Darting messenger boys and disgruntled pedestrians eyed wrathfully the high-browed man of forty, who strode along with his gray eyes fixed on vacancy.

One or two “business women” noted the clean-cut, soldierly features, the well-shaped head, with all the intellectual stamp of old Amherst, brightened by the fierce intellectual rivalry of the nervous New York press.

Artist, athlete, and thinker, Hugh Conyers had hewed his upward way through the press of bread winners out into the open, and, still sweet-hearted and sincere, he steadily eyed without truckling, New York’s golden luxury, and saw, with a living sympathy, the pathetic tragedies of the side eddies of Gotham’s stiller waters.

From his cheery den, where his sister Sara Conyers’ flowers of art bloomed, the writer looked out unmoved upon the Walpurgis nights of winter society—the mad battles of Wall Street—and the shabby abandon of New York City’s go-as-you-please summer life.

It was only in his faraway summer camp, by the cheery fire, under the friendly stars, or out on the dreaming northern lakes, floating in his beloved birch canoe, that he opened his proud heart to nature—and then, perchance, murmured in his sleep—a name which had haunted his slumbers long.

“So! It’s all over between them!” mused Hugh, as he was swallowed up in a lair of clanking presses and toiling penmen. “Mr. Fred Hathorn has arrived. God help his wife to be! The Belgian granite paving block is as tender as that golden youth’s heart.”

He well knew that the artful protégé had only used the generous woman’s volunteered bounty of the past—“as means to an end.”

“Elaine has simply coined her golden heart for that smart cad!” he sighed, as he grasped a blunted spear of a pencil to dash off an editorial upon “German Influence in the South Seas.”

In her guarded downtown office, Mrs. Elaine Willoughby resolutely put aside the one subject now nearest her heart, to summon, by signal, the fortunate man who was fast slipping out of her life.

The startled Queen of the Street gave but ten minutes’ time to the consideration of the sudden change in the affairs of a giant syndicate which used two hundred millions of dollars in swaying the world of commercial slaves at its feet.

A warning word from Hiram Endicott’s nephew (his sole confidant) told her that her lawyer-trustee had just been summoned, privately, to meet the inscrutable Chief of the Syndicate.

With keen acumen, she reviewed the hostile probing of a mighty Senate, into the Sealed Book of the great Trust’s affairs.

From her own safe, she then extracted a memorandum book and grimly smiled, as she noted a date—May 17, 1884.

She quickly read over two cipher letters, dated “Arlington Hotel, Washington, D.C.,” which had been silently handed her by Endicott’s only relative, and murmured, “Can it be that the Standard Oil people are going to quietly buy in and wager their vast fortunes on the double event?

“Hiram will know—and—what he knows we will keep to ourselves!”

A sense of absolute safety possessed her when she reflected that the sole depositary of her life secrets—the one man au courant with her giant speculations was a childless widower and had passed the age when passions’ fires glow—and was, moreover, rich beyond all need of future acquisition.