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.

Pride kept Hiram Endicott still in the ranks of his profession, while the acquired taste of money-making filled up the long days darkened by the loss of wife and daughter.

When Hathorn, replying to her summons with an anxious brow, entered the room where the beautiful architect of his fortunes awaited him, he found a strange serenity brooding upon her face.

With a brief greeting, he plunged in media res. His report was quickly made.

The unmoved listener quietly remarked, “Hold my account out of all future deals in Sugar. Do nothing whatever. I may go away for a few weeks. I do not care for this little flurry. I will stand out—and—the Judge will keep that line safe.”

The quiet decision of Elaine Willoughby’s orders gave the quietus to the young man’s eager plans for a great coup.

Watching her craftily from the corners of his eyes, he lightly turned to the proposed visit of that interesting Montana capitalist, Harold Vreeland.

“Bring him to see me, by all means!” the Lady of Lakemere cordially said. “He seems to have caught a bit of the breeziness of the pines.”

And then, when Hiram Endicott briskly entered, Mr. Frederick Hathorn fled away to the renewed struggles of the Exchange.

The quondam “only broker” was, however, not deceived. He raced on through the excited street to cover the firm’s large line of the rapidly advancing stock, and reasoned quickly as he went.

In his heart there was the conviction of a coming change in the generous heart which had been so long open to him.

“Elaine is a deep one,” he wrathfully mused. “She is either flying too high for me to follow in this—or else, she is ‘moving in a mysterious way her wonders to perform.’”

He knew her nature too well to question her explicit orders.

The nerve of a duelist, the honor of a caballèro, the courage of a plumed knight—all these were her attributes, and he was not mad enough to doubt that she knew her own mind.

The “moaning of the sea of change” oppressed him. “She has got out beyond me,” he grumbled, and then, with all the experience born of his social life “above board” and “under the rose,” he failed to remember any case wherein a loving woman had gone madly wild in approval of a man’s devotion to another daughter of Eve.

“I was a fool to take Alida up there to Lakemere, and fret my best customer with the ‘billing and cooing’ act! It was a bad play—and—yet, the break had to come!”

He swore a deep oath that he would, when married, hold Alida VanSittart well in hand, and still cling to the desirable business of the woman who had made his fortune.

“Here’s Vreeland,” he hopefully planned. “Just the fellow! Ardent, young, an interesting devil, and, rich. He will help to fill up the measure of her lonely days—and, his game can never cross my own.

“He’s a mighty presentable fellow, too, and I can perhaps strengthen my hold on her through him.”

A cautionary resolve to keep the handsome Western traveler away from Miss Alida VanSittart was born of the slight uneasiness caused by the gilded Potter’s attentions to the tall young nymph of the court of Croesus. “She is my ‘sine qua!’” he smiled. “No fooling around there!”

It was four o’clock before the busy Hathorn could get the nose of his financial bark steered safely over the saccharine breakers of the Sugar market.

And, still, a growing excitement filled the aspiring young banker’s veins.

While he had struggled on the floor of the Exchange, he was suddenly smitten with a fear that his patroness had abruptly abandoned him.

He sent a confidential lad over to watch Judge Endicott’s office, and he was soon rewarded with the reliable news that the serene goddess of Pactolus had calmly driven away after an hour’s stay at her trustee’s office.

“What is she up to?” he fretted. “I’ll find out if she really goes home!” he then decided, with a growing uneasiness, as he marked the surging tide of Sugar speculation.

He was fortunate enough to attract the personal attention of Harold Vreeland, of Montana, for that new member of the jeunesse dorée

was held socially in eclipse, until Bell’s minions should purvey the “robes of price” suited to the swelling port assumed by the bold social gambler.

The hearty assent of the fancied dupe to the evening call, enabled Hathorn to call his patroness by the private wire at the Circassia.

“By Jove! She is lucky to be out of this flurry!” he decided, when Mrs. Willoughby’s voice closed the telephonic interview without even a passing reference to “the market.” “She did go home after all!”

And, so lulled to security, he remembered all the vastness of her varied moneyed interests. He knew only the magnitude of her transactions in the past.

The hidden reasons of her Napoleonic moves he had never penetrated, and he had vainly shadowed her visits to Washington and sifted the guests at her summer palace. But now, his future control was endangered.

The crowd of guests, would-be suitors, financial and political friends hovering around her, embraced judges, generals, senators, governors, national statesmen, and party leaders.

Every social door was open to the mistress of Lakemere—and her smile, like the sunshine, beamed impartially upon all. So, the veiled espionage of the past had been fruitless.

The paid revelations of Justine had so far only rewarded him with the recurring details of the suing of many sighing gallants kneeling before her guarded golden shrine.

In the first months of the cementing of their past friendship, he had even dared to dream of a personal conquest, but the high-minded frankness of her kindness had soon killed that youthful conceit.

And now, to-day, he felt that the golden chain had snapped beyond him, and that he really had never fathomed the inner nature of the queenly woman.

But one unreserved intimacy characterized her guarded life. The union of interest between herself and Hiram Endicott.

Hard-hearted and mean-spirited, Hathorn clung for a year to the idea that the wealthy lawyer was perhaps the Numa Pompilius of this blooming woman whose roses of life were yet fragrant with summer’s incense.

But the vastness of her transactions, and even the results of his mean spying, left him, at last, absolutely persuaded that they were not tied by any personal bond.

The “man who had arrived” lacked the delicacy of soul to know that the prize might have been his, had he been true to the ideal which Elaine Willoughby had formed of him. For, he had never been frank-hearted enough to risk her refusal.

He had never forgotten the night, years ago, when he had boldly avowed to her that he had not a real friend in the world. It had been with only a coarse joy in his coming good fortune, that he had listened to her answer, “You must come to me again.”

That night, five years before, Elaine Willoughby had whispered to her own blushing face in her mirror, “I can make a social power of him. I can build up his fortunes. Men shall know and honor him—and then—”

She had never completed that sentence, framing a wish that she dared not name in words.

But he had at last coldly passed her by, and knelt before the feet of a mere girl, who valued him only for what the silent benefactress had made him. It was a cruel stroke.

“She is different from all the other women I have ever met!” ruefully sighed Hathorn, who now saw that the great Sugar intrigues were sealed from his future ken. He had watched the artful juggling of government bonds finally make a daring and aspiring New York banker rise to be a rival of the Rothschilds. He knew, by gossipy chatter, of the American Sugar Company’s alleged veiled participation in the great New York campaign of 1892.

He saw the Sugar Trust moving on to a reported influence in national affairs, and, keenly watching every lucky stroke of the Queen of the Street, he was persuaded that the finest threads of the vast intrigue in some hidden way ran through her slender jeweled hands. He saw his fault too late.

“I might have known all—if I had married her!” he decided, as he hid his disturbed countenance in a coupé on his way uptown.

He was conscious of that slight chill of change which is an unerring indication of a woman’s secret resolve.

But a last brilliant thought came to the puzzled trickster. It seemed a golden inspiration.

“Here is Vreeland, heart-free and foot-loose. I can exploit him and get him into the best houses in a month. He is not a marrying man.

“If I can work him into our stock business, I may regain her—through him—and I’ll keep Alida out of her sight. She may fancy him. I’ll post Vreeland, and, perhaps, he may find the key to her hold on the Sugar deals.

“With Justine in my pay, and Vreeland well coached, I may yet fathom the inner arcanum of the great impending deal.

“A union of the Sugar Trust and the Standard Oil interests would make the heaviest financial battery of modern times—and—by Jove—they would be able to swing Uncle Sam’s policy at will. Yes! I will push Vreeland to the front.”

With a hopeful glance at a sober banking structure, not far from the corner of Wall and Broad, the day-dreamer murmured, “I might even rise like him,” as he caught sight of a gray-mustached man, now supposed to be comfortably staggering along under the weight of a hundred brilliantly won millions.

“I have Alida VanSittart’s money—as an anchor. I will use this Vreeland as my tool. He’s an open-hearted fellow.”

Hiram Endicott, at the corner, watched the young banker dash by. The old lawyer’s thin form was still erect at sixty-five. His stern cameo face, and steady frosty eye, comported with his silken white hair.

He strode on, with the composed manner of an old French marquis. His heart was wrung with the passionate appeal of Elaine Willoughby to reopen an unavailing search of years. For she bore, in silence, a secret burden.

The morning had been given to the calm discussion of new means to unlock a mystery of the past, “to pluck out a rooted sorrow.”

Endicott’s nephew was now in sole charge of the giant battle with loaded dice, in the ring of Sugar speculation. The lawyer alone knew that Hathorn’s sceptre had departed from him. He cursed the retreating gallant.

“Can it be that the marriage of this cold-hearted young trickster has opened her eyes to the folly of educating a husband, in posse?

“Or—is it the shadow of the old sorrow, Banquo-like, returning? God bless her. I fear it is a hopeless quest.”

And yet, with all the fond dissimulation of Eve’s family, Elaine Willoughby was serenely radiant that night as the cautious Hathorn led the “open-hearted fellow” into the splendors of the Circassia. “This plan of mine will work,” mused Hathorn, who did not see the gleam of triumph in Vreeland’s eyes when the hostess asked him to visit her dreamy domain of Lakemere.

CHAPTER III.

A FRANK DISCLOSURE.

Hathorn returned, thoroughly hoodwinked, from the introductory evening spent at the Circassia. It had seemed strange to him that a leading general of the regular army, and a dapper French author, then in the brief blaze of his “lionship,” with a grave senator and a returned Polar explorer should have been called to meet together at the dinner table. “It’s Elaine’s incomparable way of making a delightful olla podrida of the social menu,” he mused, as he watched the hostess narrowly. “Caviare to the General!”

When he had found time to whisper a confidential word as to the enormous Sugar sales of the day, the Lady of Lakemere only laughed merrily. “I have now a soul above Sugar! I shall put my ‘Trust’ elsewhere!” And then, in her serious way, she slowly said: “Wait here with your Western friend, till all these other people go!” And he, with a budding hope, eagerly awaited her pleasure as of old.

Elaine’s unruffled brow bore no business shades when she drew Hathorn aside for a moment into her boudoir, leaving the luxury-loving Vreeland wandering around spell-bound in a frank admiration of the queen’s jewel-box. For so, the spacious apartment was termed in the circle of “le Petit Trianon.”

“This is only my catch-all, Mr. Vreeland,” cried Elaine, as she swept past him. “You must see Lakemere. There you can linger—and—admire.”

Harold Vreeland’s silent oath of obedience followed the woman, who fixed her sweetly serious eyes on the agitated Hathorn, in the well-remembered room where their hearts had so often throbbed with quickened beats. “Was it to be a rapprochement?”

“It is only fair to tell you, Fred,” she simply said, “that I shall have to avoid all excitements this summer. Doctor Hugo Alberg is not at all satisfied with my heart action. And, a tranquil rest at Lakemere is his sole prescription. Now, as I shall probably stay there till October first, I shall leave my speculative stock account to be handled by Judge Endicott, who has my sole power of attorney.”

The mystified broker stood aghast at losing his pet account for such a long period. Was she leaving the Street forever? He faltered, “And this means—”

“That you must hasten your marriage. There are other things in life beside making money. Of course, I have confided only in you. Potter can not trust himself—and so, I can not trust him with the secrets of any of my financial movements. You are the one young Napoleon of your firm.

“So, if you really wish to go abroad, then make Alida a June bride. I shall avoid touching the Street till late in October—and then, when your European tour is over, I shall be able to take up the game of pitch and toss again.”

He was conscious that she was keenly watching him. “Of course,” he slowly said, “it gives me all the time I want. I was really concerned about your interests. It is a good plan, and I may be able to get Vreeland to play amateur banker in my place for a few months. Potter and he seem to fancy each other. I’ll talk to Alida. This will probably suit her wishes.” It all looked fair enough, and yet—his bosom was filled with a vague alarm.

“I have already selected my present, Fred,” merrily said the Queen of the Street. “Take time by the forelock, and give up these lovely summer months to young love.” The broker’s eyes were gleaming as he said, “Can it be possible that you have gone out of Sugar on the eve of a ten per cent surplus dividend? I heard that inside rumor to-day. You know how dear to me all your interests are.”

He now felt that there was that behind the arras which was skillfully veiled from him. For her eyes were shining coldly over the smiling lips.

The dark-eyed woman simply said, “Tempt me not. I have promised Doctor Alberg to refrain.

“So, go and make yourself Benedick, the married man. It is the time of roses—you must pluck them as you pass. Come to me—when you have settled this matter. I will give you a social send-off at Lakemere worthy of ‘the high contracting parties.’”

Her voice was thrilling him now as of old, and yet, with all her kindness, he instinctively felt that something was going out of his life forever.

“It will be always the same between us, Elaine,” the young Napoleon murmured. She had risen and turned toward the door.

“Did you ever know me to change?” she softly said, as she glided out to begin a cordial tête-à

-tête with Vreeland. There was no further intimate exchange of thoughts possible between the secretly estranged couple, and, now keenly on guard, in a disturbed state of mind, Mr. Frederick Hathorn lingered in converse late that night at the Old York Club, with his quondam friend.

Harold Vreeland’s conduct at his debut had been perfectly adapted to Elaine Willoughby’s changeful mood. The deep courtesy of a perfect self-effacement, and his coldly-designed waiting policy soothed her strangely restless heart.

The woman who once could have married Hathorn was now feverishly eager to see him haled to the bar of matrimony.

“Once that he is rangé—I am then sure of myself again,” she murmured, as she saw her perfectly composed face for the last time that night in the silver-framed mirror. And yet, she knew that it was but a social mask. There was an anticipatory revenge, however, in the fact that Hiram Endicott had reported the private pooling of her enormous Sugar holdings with those of the great chief of the vast Syndicate.

The ten per cent bonus dividend, long artfully held back, was her assured profit now, and Hugh Conyers’

watchful loyalty had made “assurance doubly sure.”

Endicott had already sent out a dozen agents to take up once more the secret quest which had so often failed them—and these “legal affairs” naturally gave him the excuse for a tri-weekly visit to Lakemere.

“So, Mr. Frederick Hathorn, as you have locked the door of my heart on the outside, you may now throw away the useless key!” she mused “I will find my best defense against any weakness in the keen-witted young wife who will surely show you yet the thorns on the rosebud.”

Dreams of the past mingled with the shapes of the present, as the lady of Lakemere laid her shapely head to rest.

“He has irreproachable manners, at least,” was her last thought, as the unconscious psychology of mighty Nature brought the graceful Vreeland back to her mind. “I wonder if he is at heart like—the other?”

And so, all ignorant of the power of this self-confessed womanly yearning toward the handsome young stranger, Elaine Willoughby fell asleep, to dream of the crafty man who had not yet forgotten how her liquid eyes had dropped under his ardent gaze.

The laws of nature are the only inviolable code of life, and blindly the lady of Lakemere had passed on, all unwittingly, toward a turning point in her lonely life. Her barrier of pride only fenced out the ungrateful Hathorn, condemned for ingratitude.

Vreeland, following carefully upon Fred Hathorn’s curvilinear conversational path, easily divined the uncertainty of the greedy young broker’s mind.

“He wants Miss Millions, and yet, he would not lose his fairy godmother,” thought the crafty adventurer. “I shall go slow and let them make the game.

“But wait till I am the guiding spirit of Lakemere. She shall come forward inch by inch, and he shall unfold to me every weak spot in his armor.”

They had finished a grilled bone and a “bottle” before Hathorn foxily sought to draw out his friend as to the details of the Montana bonanza. The plan of an amateur four-months’ Wall Street experience was quietly and deftly brought in.

“You see, Hod,” frankly said Hathorn, “Jimmy Potter drinks occasionally. He has that pretty devil, Dickie Doubleday, on the string, and he plays high. Now, my lawyer alone has my Power of Attorney. I can post our confidential man.

“But, if you would open a special account of, say, a hundred thousand dollars, why, there is Sugar! There will soon be a ten per cent bonus dividend. You could see the Street, on the inside! I know that you would get along with Potter.

“You always were a cool chap. What do you say? I shall marry Alida VanSittart, and take the run over the water while I can. I don’t care, however, to lose Mrs. Willoughby. She is the heaviest woman operator in America. Her account is a young fortune to us. Think this over.”

The fine “poker nerve” of Mr. Harold Vreeland was now manifest in his quick perception of Hathorn’s trembling fingers. The smoke curled lazily from Vreeland’s Henry Clay as he said: “I will open my heart to you, Fred. All my money is already well invested. And I do not care to move a small block of my funds. Besides—

“I have been cut off from all phases of womanhood save the ‘Calamity Jane’ type, or some one’s runaway wife, for long years. I shall hurry slowly. You know the Arabic proverb: ‘Hurry is the devil’s.’ Now, by October the first, I will have had my summer fling. I will perhaps join you then, if you can make the showing that I would like. But, just now, I am going in for the ‘roses and raptures.’”

“You are not a marrying man, Hod?” cried Hathorn, in a sudden alarm.

“Heavens, no!” laughed the Western man. “Omar Khayyam’s

vision of the ‘Flower Garden’ pales before the ‘embarras de richesse’ of the New York ‘Beauty Show.’ I am as yet a free lance, and also, an old campaigner. I will solemnly promise not to marry till I see you again. But I’ll stand up with you and see you spliced.”

The compact was sealed over ’tother bottle, and then Hathorn departed in high hopes. “He will drift easily into our circle,” mused the sly broker, who, watching only his own loosening hold on Elaine Willoughby, jumped to the conclusion that Vreeland really controlled a vast fortune.

His friend had “called the turn” correctly.

“Bluff goes, it seems, even in cold-hearted New York,” gaily concluded Vreeland, as he sauntered back alone to the Waldorf. “This strangely hastened wedding will bring me at once into the best circles. Mr. Fred Hathorn’s groomsman is a social somebody. The Lakemere divinity will soon do the rest, and by the time you return, my sly friend, I will be ready to kick the ladder down on your side.” He roared with a secret glee over his own “inability to disturb his invested funds.”

With a vulpine watchfulness, he noted all Mr. Jimmy Potter’s weak points. “I must get up my poker practice,” he smilingly said, as he laid his comely head down to rest.

“‘Mr. Potter of New York’ shall reinforce that slender seven thousand dollars, or else I’m a duffer. He will never squeal, at least, not to his partner. And so I’ll go in as a wedge between this ass and this fine woman who has unconsciously loved him. Yes, it’s a good opening for a young man! A mean and easy betrayal!”

The preoccupations of the splendid wedding of Miss Alida VanSittart gave Vreeland, now “the observed of all observers,” an ample opportunity to begin that “silent slavery” of a respectful devotion upon which he had decided as his safest rôle at Lakemere.

His days were pleasantly passed in gaining a growing intimacy with the club circles to which two powerful influences had now gained him an easy access. For, Elaine Willoughby was drifting under the charm of his apparent self-surrender to her generous leadership—another handsome protégé.

His rising social star was fixed in its orbit by the honors of groomsman, and in the visites de cérémonie

, the rehearsals, and all the petty elegancies of the “great social event,” Mr. Harold Vreeland showed a perfectly good form. There was a gentle gravity in his Waldorf life which impressed even the flâneurs

of that gilded hostelry

. “There, sir,” remarked an old habitué

, “is a man who holds himself at his proper value.”

Measured and fastidious in all his ways, Mr. Vreeland neglected no trifling detail, and he calmly went onward and upward. He well knew that, for some as yet hidden reason, the bridegroom was assiduously forcing his old chum forward into the glittering ring of America’s Vanity Fair. And it exactly suited his own quiet game.

He fully appreciated the extensive influence of the Lady of Lakemere, for her friends, moved on deftly by her, now came forward to open the golden gates for him on every side.

Even before the wedding, Vreeland had made himself familiar with all the glories of Lakemere. Side by side with its beautiful mistress, he had threaded its leafy alleys, climbed its sculptured heights “when jocund morn sat on the misty mountain tops,” and gloated secretly upon the splendid treasures of that perfect establishment. “This shall be mine yet,” he swore in his delighted heart.

Out upon the moonlit lake, speeding along in a fairy launch, Mr. Harold Vreeland followed up his policy of self-abnegation. “Do you not know that I can trace your noble kindness everywhere?” he murmured.

“I am all alone in the world. Your veiled influence is making cold-hearted New York smile as a blossoming paradise for me. No; do not deny it. You are the very loveliest Queen of Friendship.” The beautiful brown eyes dropped before his eager gaze. She was a woman still.

Elaine Willoughby marked him as he went away with a growing interest. “Graceful, grateful, manly, and sincere!” was her verdict, easily reached, but one, however, not so enthusiastically adopted by either Judge Hiram Endicott or the Conyers couple, whom the Lady of Lakemere had captured for a visit before sending them away to the delightful summer exile of her Adirondack cottage.

“I don’t know what that fellow is after, Hugh?” growled the old Judge one day, as they were returning to town together; “but, he looks to me like a fellow who would finally get it.”

Conyers uneasily said: “He is the ‘head panjandrum’ of this Hathorn wedding—old college chum and all that.”

“Arcades ambo!” shortly said the silver-haired lawyer. “Mrs. Willoughby has a foolish fondness for picking up these Admirable Crichtons, and then forcing them along the road to fortune. It is only a generous woman’s weakness, a sort of self-flattery.”

“Vreeland is immensely rich—a man of leisure. Has jumped into one or two of the best clubs by mysterious backing, and seems to be all right,” slowly answered Hugh, mentally contrasting his own plain tweeds with Vreeland’s raiment of great price.

“I don’t believe a word of it,” sharply said Endicott. “Oblige me and just keep an eye on him—about her, I mean,” and the journalist was fain to give the required promise.

Their hands met in a silent pledge of loyalty to the lonely-hearted mistress of Lakemere.

The elder man alone knew the silent sorrows of her anxious soul. He alone knew of the quest of long years—a labor of love, so far fruitless.

The younger guarded his own heart secret in his honest breast, and yet, while hiding it from the world, he wondered why some man worthy of her royal nature had not taken her to wife.

As the train swept along, watching a “bright, particular star” mirrored in the flowing Hudson, Conyers sighed, “God bless her! She’s as far above me as that star, and yet, she makes my life bright.”

It was Mr. Harold Vreeland who later carried off all the honors of the sumptuous wedding as a proper “man-at-arms” in Cupid’s army. He was secretly approved by even the raffinée bridesmaids. He was also the diplomatic messenger who delivered to Mrs. Alida Hathorn that superb diamond necklace which was Elaine Willoughby’s bridal offering. Hathorn remembered after the ceremony how strangely stately were his lovely patroness’ congratulations to the radiant bride.

Vreeland’s speech at the Lakemere dinner was classic in its diction, and when the festivities slowly crystallized into iridescent memories, and the “happy pair” were half over to that “bourne” from whence many American travelers do not return—gay, glittering Paris—Mr. Harold Vreeland was soon besieged with many sweetly insidious invitations to Lenox, Bar Harbor, Narragansett Pier, Newport, the Hudson colony, and many other Capuan bowers of dalliance.

Larchmont, Lakewood, Irvington, and other summer mazes opened their hospitable golden gates to him, and a swarm of biddings to polo, golf, lawn tennis, and other youthful circles, were gladly offered by man and maid. In other words, Vreeland was launched “in the swim.”

In the hurried moments of the steamer parting, Vreeland would only vouchsafe a cool but diplomatic answer to Hathorn’s final pleadings.

“I will meet and answer you on October 1st, but I’ll look in on Potter a bit.”

He did cordially agree to give the bridegroom a friendly report of all the doings at Lakemere, and he had fallen heir to Hathorn’s intimacy with Justine—that spirited French maid, whose many life episodes had only deprived her of a shadowy candidacy for the honors of “la Rosière.” “I trust to you to look after my interests, Hod, in a general way,” eagerly said the bridegroom.

“So I will,” heartily replied the young Lochinvar à la mode, and then he mentally added: “After my own are safe.” And, so bride and groom sailed away on the ocean of a newer life.

He so far kept his promise, mindful of the gap already made by a dash into high life in his seven thousand dollars, as to closely cement an intimacy with Potter, begun over the “painted beauties.”

Mrs. Hathorn’s bridal wreath had hardly withered before the astute Vreeland, a good listener, had become the chief adviser of Potter in his doubtful warfare with that bright-eyed Cossack of Love, Miss Dickie Doubleday.

“Mr. Jimmy” now seriously contemplated a two years’ visit to Europe on the return of the successfully married Hathorn. “The little rift within the lute” was widening. Miss Doubleday was as exacting as she was charming, and even “rosy fetters of ethereal lightness” were galling to the spoiled child of fortune. Potter had secretly purchased a Gazetteer and had made some furtive studies as to Askabad, Astrachan, Khiva, Timbuctoo, Khartoum, and several other places where his golden-haired tyrant could not follow him without due premonition. He contemplated a “change of base.”

“I hope you will come in with us, Vreeland,” cordially remarked Potter. “Hathorn tells me that you are well up in stocks and as quick as lightning. I wouldn’t mind helping you to an interest. I must escape this—this—”

The puzzled little millionaire paused, for the first word was a misfit, and he was a good devil at heart. He could not abuse the tantalizing Miss Dickie Doubleday.

With a fine discrimination, the rising social star was touched with one pang of regret at the little man’s agony, now impaled on the hook of Miss Dickie Doubleday’s angle. He visited that bright-eyed young Ithuriel, and soon effected a “modus vivendi” which enabled Potter to cruise around on his yacht for one month of blessed and unhoped for peace.

In several sittings upon the “Nixie,” Mr. Harold Vreeland relieved his grateful host of some fourteen thousand dollars, by the application of the neat little Western device known as “the traveling aces.”

But, James Potter, grateful to the core, and lulled by the insidious Pommery, never “caught on,” and cheerfully “cashed up” without a murmur.

From this victorious encounter, Mr. Harold Vreeland gaily returned to Lakemere, after a brief tour of inspection of the seaside resorts sacred to the gente fina. He found everything “grist to his mill.” The gates were widely ajar.

With the patient assiduity of a well-conceived purpose, he now began to make the most of this “one summer.”

He was well aware, from the reports of the complacent Justine, that the Conyers were both out of the way, and his heart bounded with delight as he realized that Elaine Willoughby gracefully called him to her side on those four days of the week when Hiram Endicott was not in commune with her, in the splendid gray stone mansion bowered in its nodding trees.

He always paid her the delicate compliment of an implicit obedience, and in all the days of absence found the way made smooth for him elsewhere.

The circle at Lakemere was a large one, and Mr. Harold Vreeland, “with an equal splendor” and a touch “impartially tender,” became the favorite ami de maison. He failed not, however, to spread the balm of his cordial suavity on every side.

Day after day drifted happily by, the unspoken pact between the new friends becoming a stronger bond with every week, and the watchful vigilance of the young adventurer was never relaxed.

He was now grounded on society’s shores as a fixture, and apparently serenely unconscious, soon became the vogue without effort. The useless accomplishments of his college days now all came back to vastly aid the agreeable parvenu.

He had early mastered the secret of womanhood—the vague dislike possessed by all of Eve’s charming daughters for the strong-souled and unyielding superior man. For, be they never so wary, “trifles light as air” happily fill up the days of those women to whom American luxury is both enfeebling and jading. The strong man is not needed in the feather-ball game of high life.

That one rare art of the woman-catcher, “never to bring up, in the faintest degree, the affairs of another woman,” victoriously carried Vreeland on into the vacant halls of the filles de marbre. And so, “Mr. Harold Vreeland” was universally voted “a charming man of vast culture and rare accomplishments.”

Fortunately, Mr. Fred Hathorn had widely trumpeted abroad the Montana bonanza, and the vulgar slavering over an easily assumed wealth carried him on both fast and far.

In his own heart, one carefully crystallized plan had already matured. To reach the innermost holy of holies of Elaine Willoughby’s heart, and then, to rule at Lakemere—to secretly lord it later in the Circassia. With a fine acumen, he refrained from making a single enemy among her sighing swains or her fawning women parasites. “They must not suspect my game here,” he sleekly smiled.

But one brooding shadow hung over the sunshine of these days. He was always aware of the frequent visits of Judge Endicott. And Justine’s recitals proved to him that a hidden sorrow had its seat in her mistress’ soul.

There were dark days when Elaine Willoughby’s heart failed under the burden of a past which Vreeland had never tried to penetrate. She was inaccessible then. Guarding a perfect silence as to his own antecedents, he trusted to her in time to unfold to him the secrets of the heart which he had secretly sworn to dominate.

“I can be patient. I can afford to wait,” he mused, as with a faithful assiduity he came and went, and marked no shadows on the happy dial of those summer days.

“She is worth serving seven years for,” he mused; “and, for her fortune—with Lakemere—seventeen.”

“When I am master here,” he secretly exulted, “I can say: ‘Soul! thou hast much goods!’”

And so he bided his time, and yet, with keen analysis, decided to make his coup before the fretful and intriguing Hathorn returned.

“It is the one chance of a lifetime,” he mused, as he paced the lawns of Lakemere. “Once that her social support would be withdrawn, once that this suspicious devil, Hathorn, would ‘drop on’ the dangerous game I am playing, I would be soon ground between the millstones of fate.”

And his soul was uneasy as the October days approached and the blue haze of the golden Indian summer began to drift down the Hudson.

He came to the conclusion at last to put his fate to the test. For certain letters received from Hathorn at the Isle of Wight had prepared him for the explosion of a social bomb which wrecked forever Frederick Hathorn’s dreams of regaining the alienated heart of the woman who had led him up the ladder of life.

And that part of the situation which was seen “as through a glass darkly” was quickly made clear by the confidence of a fond woman who had begun to invest Mr. Harold Vreeland with all the virtues and many of the graces. Caught on the rebound, her heart was opening to her artful admirer.

The thorns upon Hathorn’s rosebud were sharp enough. He already felt the keenness of the petted Mme. Alida’s egoistic and unruly nature. And, in a clouded present, he looked back regretfully to a golden past, with every fear of a stormy future. It was the old story of two women and one man, with the poisoned-tongued society intermeddler.

There had been a little happening at the Isle of Wight which was the direct result of the young millionaire matron displaying at a yachting ball the diamond necklace which had been Elaine Willoughby’s wedding gift. Then, the tongue of envy found its ready venom.

One of those sleek devils in woman form who are the social scavengers of the world, had glowered upon those secretly coveted gems as they rose and fell upon the bosom of the young moonlight beauty.

She uttered lying words which sent Alida Hathorn back to her summer cottage with pallid lips and heart aflame.

The story was soon wafted across the sea by a sister spider, who had easily followed on the first bitter quarrel between the two parties to the “marriage of the year.” And Harold Vreeland, now on post, a watchful sentinel at Elaine Willoughby’s side, was the first one to whom her own outraged heart was poured out, as Mrs. Volney McMorris drove back to her own lair at Larchmont.

Out in the dreamy gardens, in a summer house, to the accompaniment of falling leaves and sighing pines, the indignant lady of Lakemere told her ardent listener the story of a shameful jealousy and the outpouring of a maddened woman’s wrath.

It gave to Harold Vreeland the needed cue. The decisive moment had come, and he hazarded his future upon the chance of meeting her confidence with a fine burst of manly sympathy.

To range himself forever under her colors, and to craftily lie to her, and not in vain.

His audacious devil sprite once more urged him to be both bold and wise.

Elaine Willoughby’s eyes were flashing as she repeated the relation of Mrs. Volney McMorris, who, “so anxious that her dear friend should know all and not be exposed to the ignominy of a ‘dead cut’ from Hathorn’s headstrong wife.” “And, as he is a lâche, I would use the ‘baby stare’ first, my dear Elaine,” was the parting shot of the departing McMorris. The lady of Lakemere was a roused tigress now.

Harold Vreeland listened breathlessly to the story of the bitter taunt that the diamond necklace and parting dinner had been Elaine Willoughby’s crafty “sop to the social Cerberus” in giving her handsome secret lover, Hathorn, only a furlough for the honeymoon.

The insinuation that the young husband would carry on a ménage à trois had crazed the suspicious heiress, whose new wedding bonds burned like molten gold.

“I shall soon know if Frederick Hathorn is an unutterable craven,” proudly said Elaine to her serpent listener.

“She has publicly boasted that he shall cease all semblance of friendship with me, and Mrs. McMorris told me that Alida had forced every detail of our past intimacy out of her husband, who admitted only a confidential business relation.

“‘Break it off!’ was Alida’s ultimatum, and she has publicly declared ‘war to the knife.’

“When Hathorn referred to our business connection, so profitable to the firm, Alida had cried: ‘I have money enough for both of us. I married a gentleman, not a counter jumper! You shall drop all this humbug business which has been the cloak to your amourette.’”

Elaine Willoughby saw the wonderment of Vreeland’s eyes. With a blush reddening her pale cheek, she faltered: “The maid overheard the quarrel, and she told Mrs. McMorris all. She was once her own attendant.”

“That McMorris is a genius,” mused Vreeland, as Mrs. Willoughby concluded: “And, Hathorn has been silent. I have not heard one word from him.” Her bosom heaved as she gloomily said: “I will give him a last chance to speak out, and if he acts the moral coward, then it is war to the knife!

“Her husband’s lady-love! An ex-goddess! ‘A star on the retired list!’ I will make her pay for these brutal vulgarities! I will force him to speak, and in her presence!”

The artful Mr. Harold Vreeland fancied that he had discovered the reason of the storms of sorrow which had swept over the lady of Lakemere. He knew not of Endicott’s bootless quest for a message from the misty shores of the past. “These two women foes will decide my fate!” he quickly decided. “Here is the place to leap into the breach and widen it.”

Taking Elaine Willoughby’s trembling hands in his own, he fixed his ardent eyes upon her, and once more her glances fell under the spell of his steady gaze.

His voice had the ring of sincerity in it as he proceeded with a feigned reluctance.

“You need not wait, Madonna!” Mr. Vreeland had easily reached the stage of a special appellation for the Queen of the Street.

“He has already spoken, and I will fight in this good cause—to the death, under your colors.”

He drew out a letter from Hathorn and read it slowly, without a single comment, and with a dramatic, hushed solemnity.

Before he had finished he saw in her glowing eyes that she was his prey. The poisoned arrow had struck home. She was, after all, a woman at heart.

Hathorn’s jerky letter referred to the “end of the season,” “a return incognito,” and demanded an early meeting with his chum. “I presume that you know all of Potter’s troubles. He wants to become a ‘special partner,’ and then to go away for two years. You must join us at once, or I must find another man. So, have your answer ready.” Elaine Willoughby was silent until Vreeland slowly read:

“I count on you to control in future Mrs. Willoughby’s business. Make yourself her friend and confidant. My wife is a tiger-cat of jealousy. Some fools or fiends have been working upon her spoiled babyhood. I’ve vainly told her that the woman whom she hates was past her youth and old enough to be her mother; but she will listen to no reason.

“Now, old fellow, you can easily gain Mrs. Willoughby’s good will. Her account is the best on the Street, and, in this way, if you join us, we can divide the profits, and I am then safe from a fruitless quarrel. Of course, I’ve got to drop the Willoughby for good.”

There was a shrill cry of rage and defiance. Vreeland’s heart leaped up.

“Let me read the rest of that alone,” cried Elaine, with blazing eyes. After a moment’s pause, she handed it back, when she had noted Hathorn’s signature.

“He asks you to cable him your decision!” breathlessly said the Queen of the Street.

“I have simply telegraphed: ‘Impossible! I decline!’” answered Vreeland, and then, in the silence the shade of Judas Iscariot laughed far down in hell.

Their hands met in a silent pledge of a friendship which shone in Elaine Willoughby’s misty eyes. “How can I thank you?” she began; but gravely Harold Vreeland addressed her to her growing astonishment.

“Wait!” he said, with a seeming reluctance. “I never would have shown you that letter but to save your own noble soul from the humiliation of stooping to a conference with a man who would so meanly trade upon your past bounty and try to trap you, through me. Your confidence has brought this out. But, you must hear all. I claim no credit for declining to be the man to hoodwink you. ‘The pleasant days of Aranjuez’ are waning fast. I am soon going to leave New York and go back to the great West.”

Vreeland noted the quick, convulsive start, and his heart rejoiced as she grasped his hands, whispering: “Never! My one faithful knight shall stay here near me to battle in my defense, ‘even if I am old enough to be Alida Hathorn’s mother.’ Tell me all. It is my right now to know all your plans.”

The handsome adventurer raised his grave face to her own. “I will, if you will promise me to ignore these two people—the hollow-hearted man who would use me to entrap you, and that saucy girl, a spoiled child from her cradle. Hathorn carries his own future punishment around with him in that crisp bundle of dimity.”

The unspoken pledge of her eyes told him that his coup had succeeded. “By Jove!” he mused, “she is only a woman, like the rest. The taunt as to her age has cut her deeper than this fellow’s rank ingratitude.”

He gazed upon her Indian summer beauty, and his eyes strayed away to the pillared glories of the matchless country mansion. “She’s worth the risk—with Lakemere,” he reflected. “I’ll try it!” He yielded and spoke, and she listened with tender eyes.

And the shadows deepened around them, as the young schemer told a plaintive story of emotional lying embroidery to the woman whose agitated heart was swept with a storm of revengeful feeling.

A passionate desire to punish the younger woman whose husband had used the mean taunt of her sunset years to quiet the jealous little spitfire heiress.

“I did not come to New York City under false pretenses,” began Vreeland, “but, Hathorn has taken me wrongly to be a rich man. I am only a poor man to-day, and a weary and a lonely life lies before me.”

“I could not muster the hundred thousand dollars needed to go into their firm, for I have made myself poor in the discharge of a sacred duty.”

With a fine affectation of manly earnestness, he then told the generous-hearted woman a romantic tale of his gifted father’s career, and of the death of his patient mother. He judiciously unfolded the story of his father’s professional errors, and painted that “sudden taking off” in the wilds of Montana.

A knowledge of Judge Endicott’s encyclopedic memory, and some previous hints from the wary Justine, caused Vreeland to put in a hidden plea in bar, to offset any private researches of the only two men whom he feared in Elaine’s glittering entourage. They were the silver-haired Hiram Endicott and the manly Conyers.

Once or twice he had observed the latter’s eyes searching him in no unmeaning hostility.

There were tears on Elaine Willoughby’s lashes as he concluded with manly earnestness:

“Left with a supposedly ample fortune, I found, on an examination of my father’s private papers, that there was before me a sacred task of restitution. A work of self-abnegation, of simple honesty, lay before me.

“I had never known of the baleful influence of the woman who led my father (once in her clutches) on to lead a double life.

“But, in justice to his own better self and in honor of my beloved mother’s memory, I gave up nearly all, and so arrived here with only a few thousand dollars in my pocket.”

The shades had deepened around them when he concluded with his last master stroke of manly simplicity.

“Chance threw me across Hathorn in the train as I came here to collect the only honest money left to me after my work of secret restitution was done. I saw that he valued only money—success—and the glitter of your hot-hearted swell circles.

“It was hard for me to dishonor a father’s memory. To undeceive my old college friend, I intended to ask him later for aid—for employment. But I soon saw that I would not get it. He fell into the innocent error of supposing me to be very rich.

“And,” the young special pleader rose as he said, under his voice, “I met you there—at the depot! My heart and soul craved another sight of you. And that I might meet you again, I did not undeceive him.

“You know the rest. I have been true to you, and I have given up my last hope of fortune in refusing to be his tool.”

He could see her splendid eyes shining upon him through her happy tears.

“Let us go in, Harold,” she softly said. “I must think! I must think! But promise me that you will not go away from New York till I bid you. Trust to me.”

“I promise,” he gravely said, as he lifted her trembling hand and kissed it, and then, arm in arm, they wandered back to her splendid pleasaunce palace. It was the “betrayal with a kiss.”

After the dinner, to which a few of the nearest county magnates had been previously bidden, Vreeland watched Elaine’s imperial bearing as she proudly queened it in the drawing room.

A richer rose burned upon her cheek. Her eyes were lit up with a strange fire, and her magnificent voice echoed in every heart with a thrill of a quivering life, as her defiant soul rose to the prelude of that coming war with the jealous girl who had determined to shine down the Lady of Lakemere.

The last carriage load of guests had rattled away, and Mme. Lafarge, wearied “dame de compagnie,” was nodding, with her eyes hopefully fixed upon the old colonial hall clock, when Elaine said, softly: “One last word with you in the library.”

The Queen of the Street stood there with downcast eyes before the great carved mantle, as she slowly said: “They will arrive in three or four days. You must confirm your answer to him.

“He has told me that you know stocks, and are familiar with all board matters.”

Vreeland bowed in silence.

“Then,” she said, fixing her sparkling eyes upon him, “I will make you a confession. I had decided to withdraw gradually my entire business from their firm. In fact, I have been already secretly operating through a trusted friend on the outside.

“You must find a good man, one acceptable to Hiram Endicott.

“I will set you up, and Hathorn & Potter shall soon find a rival. I will carry the war into the enemy’s camp. So be on your guard. Hathorn must never know!

“It is the only punishment for his abandonment at the first hostile signal from his enraged wife. I have made him on the Street! I can unmake him!” Her voice had the ring of a singing bugle calling to arms.

“But, I have no money,” the crafty Judas faltered.

“Leave that to me,” laughingly said Elaine. “You are now my own knight. Here are your colors.”

She handed him a knot of ribbon blue. “Come to me next week. Meet him frankly and decline all connection. Senator Alynton will be here then.”

And she smiled and pressed a rosy finger to her lips.

“The Sugar magnate!” whispered the happy Vreeland, as he stood spellbound, while his goddess fled up the stair, leaving him there alone.

CHAPTER IV.

“WYMAN AND VREELAND” SWING THE STREET.

Mr. Harold Vreeland was awake with the birds, and in an early morning walk long communed with himself under the whispering trees of Lakemere. The enchanting prospect of the superb estate delighted his eyes more with every visit. He blessed the goddess Fortune, and smiled truly, “the lines have fallen to me in pleasant places!”

It was only with a severe struggle that he concealed the secret joy now burning in his heart, and he carefully laid out all his plans for the crucial week to come. He must widen the breach.

There was the conference with Senator Alynton, Hiram Endicott, and that strange “big brother,” Hugh Conyers. He felt instinctively that these three men would not share “Madonna’s” enthusiasm.

He aimed to continually efface himself and to allow the resentful woman to goad herself along in the path of social and financial revenge.

“Any fool can stand hard times, but it takes a wise man to keep his head, under a run of winning luck!” he mused, with reminiscences of “Mr. John Oakhurst” and his pithy proverb, that “the luck usually got tired—before the man did.”

He retraced his steps to the house, and was most calmly quiescent and tenderly respectful in his adieu.

“That burst of confidence has fixed her—for good!” he mused.

“You are to report to me, here, by letter, the result of your interview with that man!” hurriedly whispered Elaine Willoughby, as her “knight” turned toward the wagonette. “I will summon you here, when Alynton comes. Do nothing else. Leave all to me.” And his eyes burned into her soul, as he promised a happy slave’s obedience.

The bright smile of the dark-eyed enthusiast haunted him all the way to New York. “Talleyrand was right,” he murmured, at ease in the parlor car, “Point de zèle! She will make all the running for me.” He enjoyed the salutations showered right and left on him, as the train picked up the men of note carrying the hopes and fears of a new week to Gotham. “I am a somebody now!” he grinned.

The rising light of the Sentinel and Locust clubs, the man who had superbly engineered the brilliant Hathorn-VanSittart’s nuptials—“the great Montana capitalist,” was surely a man of mark, and Nature’s easy gifts had earned him a warm welcome in the slightly jaded circles of the Four Hundred. He was, moreover, a “new face,” and several spasms of unrest under aristocratic corsages had already proved that there were eyes “which brightened when he came.”

As for his false rôle of man of leisure and élégant—“custom of it, had made a property of easiness.” “I am a fraud—and—half these anæmic swells are fools as well as frauds!—I am content!” he smilingly decided, as he reviewed his plans for a daring course during the next trying week.

As he had surmised, a telegram awaited him at the Waldorf from the returned Hathorn. It was of a simple directness.

“Meet me to-night, seven. Old York Club. Must have your answer reconsidered. Every inducement possible.” The subtle smile of triumph which played around his lips recalled Private Ortheri’s stern remark, “See that beggar—got him!”—as he dropped the faraway Pathan with the “long shot.”

All day, Frederick Hathorn secretly tormented himself over the curt answer, “Will be there. Vreeland.” There was much before the tortured bridegroom to arrange. The mutinous Dickie Doubleday, phantom of audacious and unrestful beauty, was now driving Mr. James Potter out of his wits.

He longed for a “boat upon the shore and a bark upon the sea!” He had learned that in some distant Afghan hole called “Swat,” there were neither post-offices, telegraphs, banks, detectives, song and dance theatres, nor any of the machinery of a “bastard civilization” which the reckless Miss Dickie could work to ensnare or follow him.

“By Gad! Just the place! I’ll get a white shirt—brown myself up like parched coffee, and turn into a Ghazi, or Dervish, or fighting Mollah—or, any old thing. She is a hummer. Pray God, that some other good-looking fellow will soon catch her ‘wandering eye.’ Her constancy is an ‘abnormal feature’ of later development. This is the only time in her life that she has stuck to a victim—for over three months. Other fellows should help me bear the burden.”

There was all the details of Hathorn’s newly enhanced social state to arrange. The Union and Metropolitan clubs were to be haunt of Benedick—the married man. And—the war to the knife, the fight of Marius and Sylla now lay before him.

There was Oakwood, his wife’s magnificent place at Ashmont, awaiting its social monture. Her Imperious Ladyship Alida had ordered him to go in for the pennant-bearing honors of Vice Commodore of the Ashmont Yacht Club, and her beautiful schooner, “L’Allouette,” was awaiting his practical hand.

A positive mandate for the best box at the Horse Show, and a royal gallery box in the tiara-wearing tier of the Opera, were matters of pressing urgency.

Hathorn was already “broken in” as a “general advance agent” and “heavy man” for his wife’s “Great Moral Matrimonial Show,” and that lady, with the coming Hathorn-Willoughby feud first in her mind, had brought luggage enough for Cleopatra and all her nymphs on that record-breaking voyage of splendor to the Cydnus.

All these and many more things busied the disgruntled Hathorn until the hour set for the meeting with Vreeland. He had posted his wife and her train away up to the Buckingham, for he felt, instinctively, that the handsome groomsman was not just the party to linger around his newly-enclosed sheepfold.

He had already discovered several shades of color in his rosebud not visible to the ante-nuptial eye, and, moreover, he was hungry for news of Elaine Willoughby and of her state of mind. He now saw the “firm’s” interests seriously endangered.

There was the vastly profitable past business connection, and “Sugar,” too, loomed up before him now as a vanishing pyramid of alluring sweetness. He knew that the woman whom he had coldly left had been the very spirit of his own wonderful success.

But Hathorn never knew how eagerly Vreeland, at the Waldorf, his anxiety veiled by a thoughtful smile, watched the clock hands crawl around till seven.

“That fool has but one chance left to ruin me forever—and—to block my little game!” restlessly reflected Vreeland. “If he only had the manly nerve to dash up to Lakemere and to throw himself there on Elaine’s generosity, he might be forgiven—even now. The swaying bosom of womanhood is always ripe for forgiveness. A woman is fondly weak to a man who calls up a lost love. And he has been all in all to her, in the past days.

“She set him up on a high pedestal and fairly worshiped him.

“Perhaps he felt like the Frenchman, that two women are necessary to every man—one whom he loves, and one who loves him.”

But the telegraphed reports of his secret spies arriving every half hour, told the delighted Vreeland that Hathorn was still “at the office.”

“Give me to-night, and just one telegram to reach the Madonna—then—I will have made that breach irrevocable!” gleefully cried Vreeland, as he was driven down to the Old York Club.

The two men met in an apparent cordiality, and the Western man’s poker nerve stood by him, as he calmly enjoyed a dinner, at which Hathorn merely nibbled, with an ill-concealed restlessness.

They exhausted all the usual banalities with regard to the well-beaten paths of the wedding tour, and Mr. Vreeland was graceful in all his perfunctory interest in the young Adam and Eve in their newly found Paradise.

When the cigars and liqueurs brought them around to the “hard-pan” stage of the interview, and a guarded seclusion, with a slow constrained manner—Frederick Hathorn began to carefully interrogate the “devil whom he had let out of the bottle.”

Vreeland keenly eyed the speaker through the blue-curling smoke of a Henry Clay, and, when Hathorn had reviewed all his past arguments as to the proposed business connection, he buried his head in his hands in deep thought.

Hathorn had even offered to aid Vreeland with the capital to qualify him as a member of the projected firm of “Hathorn, Potter & Vreeland.” It was a clear “giveaway” of his temporizing fears of the coming war.

“You see, you could swing Mrs. Willoughby’s account and give it your special attention,” concluded the man who had now shown every card in his hand.

Hathorn noticed, with a growing uneasiness, that Vreeland had been very reticent. The “Montana capitalist” had grown pompously solemn.

Suddenly his old college chum lifted his head, and frankly eyed the anxious banker. “Have you conferred with Mrs. Willoughby on this plan?” he said, curtly. It was pinning his dupe to the cross—this sly thrust.

Hathorn stammered, as he reddened, “Why—no! I have left that all to you. I have not written her nor seen her, since the wedding dinner. The fact is—” and the alert man of the world was left strangely searching for words which seemed to die away on his lips. He dared not betray his wife’s orders.

“I may as well say frankly,” impressively remarked Vreeland, “and, right here—once for all, that I can not enter your firm. I have made other plans. The thing you propose is impossible. I am sorry—but it is impossible.”

“How does Mrs. Willoughby look at it? I thought that you were getting on splendidly there?” feebly urged Hathorn, conscious that he was very rapidly slipping “down hill.”

There was a fine show of regret in Vreeland’s speaking eyes, as he slowly answered, “My dear boy! You have made the mistake of your life. There are some very ugly social rumors current in my clubs—” he paused, “more in sorrow than in anger.”

“And those stories wafted over the sea do not lose by the telling. I have refrained from even mentioning your name, or that of your wife, to Mrs. Willoughby since this petticoat cabal has taken up the subject of the impending social war. Women’s unbridled tongues are the furies’ whip-lashes.”

Hathorn sprang up in excitement. “By Jove! Hod! I look to you to tell me the whole miserable business. I’ve taken you up and worked you in at Lakemere. You have got to stand by me now.”

“Hold on! Stop right there,”

coldly remarked Vreeland, with a vicious gleam in his stony eyes. “I never mention a woman’s name. That is a point of honor with me. I am no club scavenger.

“You know what you owe to Elaine Willoughby. She was the architect of your fortunes. Perhaps she builded better than she knew.

“You can not face the situations publicly. I advise you to keep silent—and—to keep others silent.

“Now, beyond that I will not go. I feel that your references to me, and what you have done for me, authorize me to say that I have more than repaid you in the volunteer labors of your wedding.

“Once for all, let us drop Mrs. Willoughby. I will not, in any way, take sides in this unfortunate affair, save to silently cleave to the Lady of Lakemere, through good and evil report.

“If you dare not face her, if you have abandoned her to the mercies of the pack of be-diamonded old ghouls who are slandering her, you know, of course, that you will close the door of your house to every friend of hers.” The bridegroom was cornered—and his heart was filled with a sullen despair.

Hathorn strode up and down the room in a white rage. He paused, at last, before Vreeland, and then, in a choking voice, said: “I must ask you to return my last confidential letter.”

Vreeland calmly moved toward the door. “I am a free man—am I not?” he quietly said. “I believe a letter is the property of the party to whom addressed when regularly delivered through the mail. When you divide the clans of society you will find me—on the other side.

“And, as my time is of value, you will now excuse me. Don’t force me to tell Potter, whom I respect, that you only wanted to use me as a stool pigeon to entrap the woman who has made you what you are—a solid man—in Wall Street!”

With a mad impulse, Hathorn sprang to the door.

“No! by Jove! No row here!” he muttered, and when he sauntered downstairs with an assumed carelessness, his guest had departed.

There was a “lively interlude in married life” transacted late that evening “behind closed doors,” at the Buckingham, in which Mr. Frederick Hathorn, for the second time that evening, suffered a sore defeat, and “went below” to seek the consolation of Otard-Dupuy & Co.’s very ripe old pale cognac.

That bright-eyed falcon, Alida Hathorn, then and there ran up the red flag of “War to the Knife”—and “No Surrender!”

But the jubilant Harold Vreeland slept not till he had personally, at Broadway and Twenty-third Street, sent off an urgent dispatch to Lakemere. “I think that reads strongly enough,” chuckled Vreeland, as he gazed on the words.

“He played the craven. Wanted me to give him secret reports of your affairs, and then demanded his letters back. All relations are permanently broken off. Will guard absolute silence.”

It was at his leisurely breakfast in the Palm Garden, the next morning, that Vreeland, with a wildly-beating heart, tore open “Madonna’s” answering message.

He stifled the cry of exultation which rose to his lips, for the Rubicon was passed. It was really now “Guerra à cuchillo!”

Elaine Willoughby’s words were replete with that fortiter in re which the unlucky Hathorn was destined later to realize. He only knew her suaviter in modo.

“Ignore him. Be ready to report when I call you. Party from Washington expected in three days. Stand to your colors!” The signature, “True Blue,” was a reminder of their secret pact.

“I think, Mr. Frederick Hathorn, that I have you ‘dead to rights’ now,” mused Vreeland, who determined that the “social war” should blaze up fiercely, but without his hand at the bellows.

A round of calls in the next three days proved to him that Mrs. Alida Hathorn had harked back on all the old intimacy of the unhappy bridegroom, and was diligently sowing broadcast the Cadmus teeth of merciless and pointed satire upon the “sunset beauty on the retired list.” “A woman old enough to be my mother!”

When appealed to by many bright-eyed banditti, Mr. Harold Vreeland merely sadly shook his head in a vague deprecation. “I know nothing whatever,” he softly sighed. “All this sudden gossip is Greek to me, Greek of Cimmerian darkness.”

In the two clubs which he most affected, Vreeland—in a manly burst of platform oratory—when appealed to by eager quidnuncs—sternly announced his code.

“I never take a woman’s name on my lips in gossip. I know nothing, I have heard nothing—and—excuse me—I will listen to nothing. Both the ladies are valued friends of mine.” He was voted a “thoroughbred.”

But, in his craven heart, he rejoiced at the rapid spreading of the war. Knowing that Hathorn would watch him, he avoided lower New York until after Madame Elaine Willoughby had made one brief downtown visit for a serious consultation with her agent, Endicott.

With a well-judged cautionary wisdom, he also avoided the “Circassia,” which was, indeed, watched by Hathorn’s spies, and he grinned with delight when his growing band of friends re-echoed his own skillfully planted suggestion of a winter trip to Europe.

“I am thinking of an extended tour,” he frankly admitted, and he soon knew that this had reached the humiliated Hathorn, for James Potter, Esq., in a personal visit, urged Vreeland to join him in that memorable expedition to “Swat,” which was to throw the mutine Miss Dickie Doubleday forever “off the track.”

“I’ll give you a carte blanche as my guest, Vreeland,” laughed Potter. “You can take anybody you want on my yacht—save only that bright-eyed devil, Dickie.”

It was evident Hathorn had not “blabbed,” for Potter gaily said: “I don’t blame you for keeping out of business. Lucky dog that you are—Hathorn has got a first-class man, Renard Wolfe, to go in as active, and I relapse into a special partner—but we would have sooner had you.”

When Vreeland hastened back to Lakemere, in answer to a laconic dispatch, “Come up at once,” he knew of the increasing bitterness of the impending war. Mrs. Willoughby, riding through Pine Street, had given her one-time protégé Hathorn the dead cut, before a dozen magnates of Wall and Broad, to their open-eyed amazement.

Every broker on the Street was now eager to snap up “the Willoughby’s” business, and Mr. James Potter, abstracting a “Gaiety Girl” from an inchoate visiting troupe, had hastily set sail for “Swat,” via the Suez canal, with a little partie carrée to avoid a storm of queries—couched with “Say, old fellow, what the old Harry’s all this rumpus between the Hathorns and your ‘star’ customer?”

The placid Potter, far out beyond Fire Island, delightedly left the “high contracting parties” to fight it out between them, à

la mode de Kilkenny.

And, the wonder grew as the golden letters “Hathorn, Wolfe & Co.” soon took the place of the conquering device, “Hathorn & Potter,” over the door of the booth in Mammon’s mart where Elaine Willoughby’s helping hand had built up the fortune of the ingrate protégé.

The handsome Vreeland was light-hearted as he approached Lakemere, for he was pondering over a letter of special invitation received to a diner de cérémonie

to emphasize the reopening of Mrs. Alida Hathorn’s superb Fifth Avenue mansion, a patrimonial hereditament gloriously embourgeoned for that winter social campaign in which Mrs. Alida proposed to crush “that woman Willoughby.”

The young matron had taken the bit between her teeth and was boldly rallying all her clans, with a fine social programme adapted to both attract the “outer woman,” and charm the “inner man.”

Vreeland’s courteous declination of the dinner on the ground of “his impending departure,” had caused Mrs. Alida to dispatch the energetic Mrs. Volney McMorris to glean from Vreeland, in an artfully contrived “chance interview” at the Waldorf, all these details of the sudden estrangement which the bride of a few months could not extract from the morose Hathorn.

But, always sedate and sly, Vreeland brought all his batteries to bear on the double-faced Madame Janus, who had already earned a diamond bracelet by her Vidocq operations from Hathorn’s reckless wife.

The “McMorris Investigating Committee” was a flat failure. Vreeland—a glib liar—“voiced his yearning” for London and its extensive jungles replete with the social lion, alive or stuffed.

He gracefully glided out of the buxom gossip’s snares and bore off a full account of Alida Hathorn’s plans, and a true relation of that encounter in the leafy mazes of Central Park, where the watchful Mrs. Elaine Willoughby, from the citadel of her victoria, froze the beautiful Mrs. Hathorn with a pointed ignoring of the woman whose “wedding dinner” had been the vaunt of Lakemere.

The fortuitous presence of Senator David Alynton, with his secret partner, the Queen of the Street—the astonishment of that lovely blonde patrician, Mrs. Mansard Larue, the companion of Hathorn’s imprudent wife, had given the news of the “incident” to all the gentlewomen in Gotham, as well as to clubdom.

Messrs. Merriman, Wiltshire and Rutherstone, in a noisy cabal at the Old York Club, waylaid every “good knight and true,” until, when their discussion had reached its height, the accidental incoming of Hathorn brought about a strained and solemn hush, in which “the beating of their own hearts was all the sound they heard.”

With a whitening face, Hathorn sped away to the Fifth Avenue fortress of the VanSittart tribe, to angrily demand, “What new tomfoolery is on the tapis?” while the three young buzzards of the club spread the news that “the battle is on—once more—” and then, gaily whetted their youthful beaks accordingly upon the succulent elephantine tips of their “sticks.”

Eager leopards of the “society journals” lurking in that dim penumbra between “the high tin gods” and the “toilers of New York,” seized upon the garbled details and, with rending sarcasm, and thinly varnished innuendo, hinted that the “first blood and knock-down” of this finish fight were to be credited to that remarkably knowing matron, Madame Elaine Willoughby, of Lakemere.

“It has gone on too far ever to be healed, this breach between the sundered hearts,” delightedly decided the buoyant Vreeland, as he stepped out of the train at Irvington. “All I have to do now, is not to cross my own luck.”

He was startled as, when about to enter the wagonette, a village lad on watch shyly bade him walk into the ladies’ waiting room, where the adroit Justine was waiting for him with tidings of moment. Mr. Harold Vreeland had won the caoutchouc heart of the piercing-eyed French soubrette by his golden largesse. He had learned the importance of “parting freely” when it was to his profit, and several hundred dollars of Jimmy Potter’s poker money had already enlarged the growing hoard with which Justine proposed to buy a neat cabaret in Paris and set up a bull-throated gamin whom she resolutely adored.

“Be on your guard!” Justine whispered. “Mr. Hathorn has just now tried to bribe me to watch you and Mrs. Willoughby. He has tormented Doctor Hugo Alberg, also. The Doctor is my friend,” modestly admitted Justine, with the deference of dropped eyes to her imperiled “character.”

“I have been down at New York arranging the ‘Circassia’ for our home-coming. Hathorn has offered Doctor Alberg anything to bring him once more accidentally into Mrs. Willoughby’s presence.

“He came up yesterday to Lakemere—and yet Madame absolutely declined to see him, and so she returned his card. And, to the old lawyer, ce brav’ vieux

Endicott, he, too, has made the call—‘to demand a hearing’—as an old friend.

“I heard Madame and the Judge talking. And now—to-day—there are the Senator, the journalist, Monsieur Conyers, and the Judge Endicott all day in the library with Madame. So, mon ami, beware!”

The fifty-dollar bill which Vreeland pressed into her hand was an inspirational piece of good judgment, and Gallic prayers from a too-inflammable heart followed him as he darted away to the wagonette.

“I will back the Queen of Hearts to win!” mused the vigilant Vreeland, as he arranged his “society face” for that watchful and nonchalant repose which totally disarmed the three men whom he met at dinner.

There was not an awkward undercurrent of import to the evening in which Harold Vreeland, forewarned and forearmed, knew that he was always “under fire”—that greatest test of nerve—simply bidden to “stand fast and wait for orders.”

He watched the “casement’s glimmering square” long after the house was still, slowly revolving his crafty plans, and as yet ignorant of the day’s secret council so vital to his future career.

He knew not of the sympathetic silence of Conyers, his fine intellectual face hidden in a window’s shadow, while Endicott had frankly related all that he had known unfavorable of the late Erastus Vreeland, Attorney and Counselor at Law, Solicitor in Equity, and Proctor in Admiralty.

Senator David Alynton, remembering that the owners of the “Clarion” also owned a good-sized block of “Sugar,” and were the secret press agents of the Trust, tried earnestly to obtain an opinion from the taciturn Conyers. “I know nothing whatever of this man,” gallantly answered the writer. “This thing seems to me to be like a marriage—in which the seal of the bond goes on before anything definite is known of the parties’ real character.”

The formation of a new firm to handle the business lost by Hathorn’s sudden and egoistic plunge into matrimony was the matter under discussion.

“It seems to me, Madame,” said the sagacious Alynton, “that if you intend to put this young man into such a place of grave trust, there should be another partner, provided, one acceptable to our side, and—if possible—one known to me. And we must not, moreover, have a mere tyro. I should like to approve one name in the new firm—if you select the other.”

“Be it so,” gravely said the Lady of Lakemere. “I will only say for Mr. Vreeland, that I know all of the secrets of the life of his late unfortunate father, and of the son’s manly actions in closing up all his father’s scattered affairs. I will back him with all the money needed, and, also, guarantee his good faith, provided he alone controls such ‘private business’ as is handled through me. Judge Endicott has told me nothing new of the elder Vreeland. I think I can suggest a plan to find the other man whom we want, or else a firm already in existence, which will commend itself to you, Senator. Let us advertise, guardedly, for a partner.”

With a sigh, Hiram Endicott drew Conyers out of the room, and while Senator Alynton yielded to the dark-eyed lady’s most ingenious plan, the old lawyer, under the trees, dejectedly said, “Conyers! there is again the woman enigma! A woman with heart certainly needs no head. And—a woman with a head should be heartless.

“The one can only be happy in being deluded, it seems—and the other can be properly left to coldly play the game of life in safety—and then smile at her dupes. This dear woman, unfortunately, has both head and heart, and so, she must suffer.

“This young fellow’s fine eyes have done the business—his mellow, pleading voice carries the day. To be first favorite—vice Hathorn, discharged—Vreeland, promoted from the ranks!”

While Senator David Alynton, a cool, gray-eyed young millionaire wearer of the toga, a senator à

la mode, listened to Elaine Willoughby’s earnest arguments, he forgot that he was but forty years of age.

Though he was often an official listener to secrets in the marble capitol which might make or break the future of the Sugar Trust, he was also a raffiné man of the modern world—a luxury-lover—fond of money, and of its concrete power.

He knew, too well, that Elaine Willoughby was “game” to back her own candidate with a fortune as great as his own.

He felt that the past safe connection with Hathorn and Potter was broken for all time. He saw that the secret chief of the vast Syndicate blindly trusted the Queen of the Street, and, moreover, he was a man who was unable to resist the warm, womanly nature which drew him as the moon draws the seas.

“If you will personally watch over your young neophyte, Lady Mine,” he said, at last, “I will side with you. Your interests are mine. I hope that you do not forget what we both have to lose.” The Senator was mindful of the sanctity of his “toga,” now.

With softly shining eyes, she thanked him. “After all,” she laughed, her bosom heaving with the pride of victory, “you and I are the only real parties in interest here. We will let Endicott receive all the answers, and dear old Hugh Conyers can closely examine the whole record of the man whom we select as working partner.

“Between Vreeland and myself, the line of communication to you shall be guarded. As of old, Judge Endicott shall act for me—and I will alone handle all that concerns you. Even Vreeland shall never know—there’s my hand on it. You know that Hathorn has always been secretly kept ‘in the dark’

—against the day of his turning—like the fabled worm. You are safe as regards him—while I—”

She sighed, and left the man who was the “missing link” in the great scheme of active operations, wondering if she had ever really loved Hathorn. The young Senator was unconsciously grimly jealous.

“Damned little snob!” wrathfully cried the Senator. “I hope that purse-proud young minx of a wife will make his life a hell. I fancy that she can be trusted to do that.” It was Alynton’s just idea of Nemesis.

The Senator had gone back to the Capital next morning with a parting pledge to make a flying visit to the “Circassia” in two weeks to settle the vital matter on Mrs. Willoughby’s winter hegira to New York, and the active lawyer and the busy journalist had also fled back to Gotham before Elaine Willoughby in the summer home had listened to all of Harold Vreeland’s accurate relation.

“I can not afford to tell her the whole truth—as yet!” he had rightly decided, and he wisely abstained from adding a shade of color. For she was watching him keenly. It was the turning tide of his life.

“You are my own true knight,” she gaily said, with an assumed lightness. “I wish you to ignore this coming social battle entirely. You are to be strictly non-committal. I will deal with both the Hathorns. Read that.” She handed him a paper. “In this way we will receive tenders from perhaps fifty individuals, and even from some good firms already established.

“I will myself, handle the secret side of the operations, and Judge Endicott will guide you in my general business. When we have found the right man as a partner, our whole party will examine his past through the various mercantile agencies, surety companies, business detectives, and then, Endicott and Conyers, too, can throw on the searchlight.

“The new firm will go ahead—I can answer for that—and I will then be free to openly meet Mrs. Alida Hathorn, on her chosen battle ground of Vanity Fair.

“You are to do nothing but to simply wait at the Waldorf—and come to me daily at the ‘Circassia.’

“As for Hathorn—a strict avoidance of him—that is my one condition.”

“The quarrel—but—the cold oblivion of the grave! Your friendship is dead to him!”

“And—you are never to mention their names in society. Leave them to me.”

“I swear it—by this,” solemnly said Vreeland, as he kissed the knot of ribbon blue. The glistening-eyed woman saw that it had lain on his heart.

She rose and left him to study the strange public call for a collaborator in that fierce fight for “the unearned increment” which was to make his fortune—by a woman’s fondly trusted faith.

He read an advertisement which made a huge increase a week later in Hiram Endicott’s daily mail. For the Herald, in special display, in its financial page, printed the following—in an artful display:

“To Capitalists and Stock Brokers.”

“Wanted.—A gentleman of the highest integrity, who controls one of the largest speculative stock businesses in and around New York City, desires to meet an associate with $200,000 cash, with view of establishing New York Stock Exchange house, or would make partnership arrangement with a New York Stock Exchange firm who desire to increase their business. References given and required. Principals only. Address, for one week,

“H. E., Herald Downtown.”

Mrs. Elaine Willoughby had been a month entrenched in her apartments at the “Circassia,” and the last summer roses had drifted down over the silent walks of Lakemere, before the astute Vreeland had made a surface acquaintance with Mr. Horton Wyman, whose name later headed the sober-looking black and gold sign on a spacious Broad Street office, reading, “Wyman & Vreeland, Bankers and Brokers!” For the new firm had been bravely launched by Alynton and his lovely ally.

All that Vreeland knew was that Mr. Horton Wyman was a near relative of Senator David Alynton, and that he had just given up the cashiership of a respectable bank to enter the New York Stock Exchange.

The adventurer, lost in admiration of Elaine Willoughby’s executive ability, never knew of that tête-à-tête dinner, and the long council of the Queen of the Street with Alynton and Judge Endicott.

Out of fifty applications, Mr. Horton Wyman had been selected. As Senator Alynton pithily said, “It’s my man and my money against your man and your money.” The Senator himself had answered the call for his relative.

He did know that Judge Endicott’s nephew, Noel, was the cashier of the new firm, now in full blast, and that he alone received the orders of the Queen of the Street from the private wires in the Hanover Bank Building.

And he knew, too, that Mr. Frederick Hathorn’s office boasted no longer the “inside tip” on Sugar from the woman who was carrying a social war “into Africa” and had already staggered even the audacious Mrs. Alida.

The checks of the new firm on the “Chemical Bank” were already recognized as those of people “who could swing the Street,” and some daring “deals” had opened the game.

It was Vreeland’s duty to confer once daily with his strangely-found benefactress, and yet, he felt even now that he was but half within the door.

But one bitter hatred followed his rising star, and he soon heard the sneer of Frederick Hathorn: “So he lied to me, and has sneaked into business behind a woman’s petticoats.

“Wait! Set a beggar on horseback—he will ride to the devil.” For all that, “they never spoke as they passed by.” The war was now on in earnest.

CHAPTER V.

TOWARD THE ZENITH.

It had been the one haunting dream of Harold Vreeland’s fevered young manhood to finally reach a financial position wherein “the solid ground” would not fail beneath his feet. Before the Christmas snows had whitened the roofs of old Trinity his star was crawling surely toward its zenith. He was, figuratively speaking, “on velvet.”

Though he realized the cogent truth of Jimmy Potter’s maxim that the desire of one’s heart would always finally come around to the patient man, he was yet filled with a vague uneasiness. He was entrenched at the Waldorf en permanence, and his personal bank account had reached the snug sum of twenty thousand dollars.

The status which he held in the firm was that of the office partner, and he was also authorized to draw one thousand dollars per month. “If you need anything else, apply to me directly,” was Mrs. Willoughby’s quiet order. Anxious not to show even the faintest eagerness, he was passively contented, allowing his patroness to make the game. And yet he always watched her, lynx-eyed.

“My duties,” he had simply demanded.

“You are for the present to confer alone with Mr. Wyman,” answered Elaine. “The books and cash will be in the sole keeping of young Noel Endicott. I may say that he alone will sign the firm’s checks and the balance sheets will be privately rendered by him to Judge Endicott, who represents me, as well as the power behind your new associate, Mr. Wyman.

“You are to carry on the current business in agreement with Wyman. Both of you will have access to all the customers’ ledgers, but the conditions of your continuance as a broker is that only a strictly ‘commission business’ shall be carried on. And, above all things, silence and discretion.”

“In other words,” slowly said Vreeland, “Judge Endicott is really the responsible holder of the firm’s assets.”

“Precisely so,” smiled Elaine. “His only nephew is the cashier and the head bookkeeper has been named by the other principal.”

“Am I to confer as to details with Judge Endicott?” was Vreeland’s last query.

“Only with me,” she smiled. “You are to be my own knight, and I lay this last injunction on you: Business is never to be mentioned to me save in our daily interview of affairs. My social hours are sacred.” He bowed and smiled.

“If anything of moment should occur,” he murmured.

“You will be held harmless,” she smiled. “Obey orders, if you break owners.”

Perfectly conscious that Hathorn would probably spy upon him, fearful of over-reaching himself by any rash hurry, Mr. Harold Vreeland assiduously delved into all the daily business details and carefully refrained from urging on the growing social intimacy with his patroness.

Horton Wyman and Noel Endicott were both University Club men; the last, a stalwart son of Eli, was a survival of the fittest from the shock of football and the straining oar.

The cool head bookkeeper, Aubrey Maitland, was Wyman’s daily luncheon companion, and young Noel Endicott always fled away at noon hour to the Judge’s office, where the oak was sported.

It was only in their regularly exchanged uptown social courtesies that Vreeland was enabled to study his partner.

It was, after all, of very little moment to him, for they both seemed to be “personally conducted” by that silvered-haired old solon, Hiram Endicott. Their way was made very smooth.

“It’s a very strange situation,” mused Vreeland. “I am a sort of Ishmael—playing my hand against every man’s. They all think to find me soon growing uneasy and squirming around in curiosity.

“‘Time and I against the whole world,’ said William the Silent. It’s a good motto, and I will let them make the whole game. But, by and by, I will get behind the scenes, and then ‘shove the clouds along.’”

With a rare self-control, he continued his judicious self-effacing policy, and yet slyly watched the impartial welcome extended by Elaine Willoughby to the stream of notable and desirable men who thronged her hospitable halls.

The preliminary skirmishes of the coming battle with the Hathorns had vastly amused him, and “all society” knew now of the impassive prudence of the rising star. It had been Elaine Willoughby’s one fault that her strong nature leaned little on other women. For her strong nature buoyed her up above the petted society dolls around her.

She knew that they were barren Sahara deserts to her; she was perfectly conscious of the absolute dearth of interest in woman natures for each other. The few respectable “relicts” who sought her bounty were always ranged near her, like old battleships on the shores of Time, honorably scarred, but “out of commission” and, unfit for action. Their mild incense of perfunctory flattery was but a prelude to the confession of their thousand little wants. And to them, she played the Lady Bountiful.

But Vreeland honestly, yet silently, gloried in Elaine Willoughby’s brilliant early winter social campaign.

A lovely Napoleon, she rallied her hosts in a changed strategy of audacious energy; she chose her own battle-grounds and vastly outnumbered her enemy at every point of concentration. It was a war to the knife.

Through unknown agents, the Lady of Lakemere had deftly captured the best box in the Horse Show, and eke the same in the Canine Exposition. She had ensnared the one most eligible Opera box upon which Mrs. Alida Hathorn doted, and then, drawing to her splendid halls the most desirable men to battle over, Mrs. Willoughby easily attracted a crowd of bright-eyed beauties there ready to struggle for their selected “eligibles,” “notables,” and desirables. There was music and laughter, the gleam of tender eyes, the sheen of white shoulders, the glow of ivory bosoms, and all the magnetic thrill of rich young womanhood pervading the Circassia.

It was no secret that a house party of forty would keep a “merry Christmas” at Lakemere, and, all in vain, did Alida Hathorn strive to secure the most sparkling pendants of the “inner fringe” for the widely thrown open doors of Oakwood. Her Indian summer antagonist was an easy victor.

Some merry, audacious devil seemed to have roused himself in Elaine Willoughby’s bosom, and she was boldly lancée now. Knowing well what a woman’s war to the finish means, the sly Elaine drew off with her varied and sumptuous entertainments all the desirable men and Beauty’s beautiful Cossacks soon swooped down upon them.

Only Vreeland could trace Senator Alynton’s influence in the vastly enlarged glittering circle of foreign diplomats and well accredited European visitors of rank.

The Army and Navy gallantly charged upon the battalions of Mother Eve’s fairest forlorn hope, and humble but effective ammunition—the canvas-back duck, the terrapin of our beloved land, choicest wines, chilled and warmed in the right order—did all the execution possible.

The delicately ordered beaufets were a “continuous performance” to a star engagement.

And, by a rare self-command, the warring woman with difficulty refrained from all open attacks upon the Hathorns, but yet deftly drawing the “financial swells” to her side by the generally accepted conclusion that there had been something wrong with Hathorn & Potter.

No one suspected the genial James of intermeddling. He had reached no further point in his voyage to Samarcand, or Swat, than gay Villefranche.

On his cozy yacht, the guileless Potter learned that Miss Dickie Doubleday, who had returned all of his “burning letters,” but, none of the sparkling votive diamonds, had dashingly captured and cut out a Western mining man of untold millions who guilelessly had drifted under her guns from a “star” of the Metropolitan opera. And, the festive Miss Dickie was now in the seventh heaven.

The gay Eastern Elijah was overjoyed to see his rosy mantle descend upon the Occidental Elisha, and he cautiously confided to his deported “Gaiety Girl” the opinion that the “sun-burned buffalo of Butte would find out a lot of things before spring.” They drank the health of the faithless Dickie Doubleday in much champagne of rosy tint, as the white stars shimmered around them on the blue waters of the Mediterranean. And so, the “honors were easy” in this little game of hearts.

In vain did many friendly financiers urge Jimmy Potter’s return by the often cabled news that “Hathorn was making a fool of himself in Wall Street.”

“That’s his own lookout,” calmly replied the special partner, who rightly feared that the chasm between him and the all too amiable Dickie Doubleday was not yet quite deep enough for safety.

“By Jove! that girl is capable of running a tandem,” he reflected, and, he had no desire to be hitched up later, even in silken harness, with the robust “brown buffalo of Butte.” For he had drawn a “queen” in the last deal.

He would have quickly turned the prow of the “Aphrodite” homeward, however, if he had known of a strong-hearted woman’s resolute determination to run the firm of Hathorn, Wolfe & Co. ashore, and to sink it under the guns of the unsuspected enemy which was now “swinging the Street.”

And as artful a game as Delilah ever “put up” for Samson, was one element of Mrs. Willoughby’s campaign, for she was now “fighting all along the line.”

The watchful Harold Vreeland was soon made conscious that he was an object of general interest even in the cold-hearted hurry of Manhattan. He knew that he penetrated three varying atmospheres in his daily life.

The society racket, the dress parade of the Waldorf and the clubs, was one phase of his busy existence; the shaded dignities of his Broad Street office another, and he was now assured that an invisible halo of assiduous espionage now followed him in his down-sittings and uprisings.

There was the maddened Hathorn, the inscrutable Elaine Willoughby, and his cautious and silent partner, Horton Wyman.

“I’m pretty well followed up!” he smiled, with a cunning glee.

Continually on guard in society, and ever straining all his mental powers to familiarize himself with all the details of their growing business and the unwritten lore of the feverish Street, Vreeland was really only uneasy at heart as to his continued probation.

For he felt now, as the holiday season approached, that he was merely being hoodwinked by the dark-eyed benefactress, whose fullest confidence he had not as yet gained.

“Madonna’s” social manner was frankly charming, but he had made no progress toward any further intimacy. Some shade seemed to hold them tenderly apart. And he racked his brains in vain.

“Ami intime de la maison!” He had only learned more of her rare dignity in the repeated business interviews, and in the continued tableaux of her splendid social entourage, he was no nearer to her than others.

There was the cool Conyers, who always came and went at will; he had also seen Senator David Alynton and the silent Wyman out driving with his lovely patroness. There were also tête-à-tête dinners, too, with the old Judge and that young son of Anak, Noel Endicott, and moreover the well-bribed Justine spoke, too, of breakfasts where only Wyman and the handsome bookkeeper, Aubrey Maitland, were guests. All this was dangerous.

“Hang me if I can see why I am kept here,” uneasily fretted Vreeland. “The firm would move along just as smoothly without me,” but yet in his soul he felt that the steadfast woman still held him in reserve for some well-matured purpose of her own.

With admirable sang froid he awaited her orders in an expectant silence.

“She shall not weary me out; but once let the cards come my way, then I will play the queen for all she is worth.”

He knew in the drift of customers gradually drawn in by the now acknowledged solidity of their firm, that there were many spies and stool-pigeons of the angry Hathorns.

He knew, too, what cold resentment burned in his old chum’s heart. He had secretly followed (through his agents) some of these skirmishers directly back to Hathorn, Wolfe & Co.’s office. And the cards were played both from the top and the bottom of the pack.

Once he had himself caught Hathorn’s eyes following him with all the wolfish glare of a murderous heart.

There were, besides, rumors of quarrels in the opposing firm and the early retirement of the returning Potter.

And other sly traps were laid for him with silky scoundrelism. He was well aware that the defiant Alida Hathorn had openly expressed her utter disbelief in the existence of the late Wharton Willoughby. Even the prehensile Mrs. Volney McMorris had waylaid him to confess that she had never observed, in either of Mrs. Willoughby’s establishments, any mortuary bust, portrait, or even an humble photograph of the permanently eclipsed man who had given his name to the Queen of the Street. These things were food for uneasy thoughts harassing to the young schemer.

And this respectable social scavenger had faltered out some indirect javelin thrusts evidently pointed by Hathorn’s willfully reckless wife.

There were at least two men in Elaine Willoughby’s entourage who, for gain and a passion under the rose, might be the source of all that quietly-sustained splendor which had so enraged the young married heiress.

Mr. Harold Vreeland was on guard. He only fixed his fine eyes upon Mrs. McMorris in a pained surprise when that bustling dame hinted that he could easily drag forth the desired information.

“I have always had a penchant, my dear Madame, for minding my own business,” was his most prudent rejoinder.

So, entrenching himself in the towers of silence, he was safe, but Vreeland also left a bitter enemy behind, on the pleasant afternoon when he wondered why Messrs. Merriman, Wiltshire, and Rutherstone had bidden him “to be one of a little party of four” at the Old York Club. It was an able effort at scientific pumping.

He had never entered that gilded fortress of the jeunesse dorée

since his last definite quarrel with Hathorn, and he knew, too, that these three “splendid examples of the evolution of American manhood” now made up a little coterie which was a sort of Three Guardsmen brotherhood around Mrs. Alida Hathorn.

There were rumors of gay little Sunday afternoon frolics at the Hathorns’, justifying Pip’s exclamation, “Such larks,” and these three young fellows now directed the broad-gauge festivities of a home whose master always wore a stern frown like the late lamented “Baron Rudiger” of the German song.

It was Harold Vreeland’s chosen part to be left judiciously uncompromised. He was still playing a waiting game. He knew that certain very dégagée

young “married women” afforded much “congenial pabulum” for these three sleek young society sharks, and that the careless Mrs. Alida Hathorn was fast drifting into their hands.

And so, after a long séance, wherein floods of wine drenched the festal board, the sly adventurer found out at last the motive of his sudden popularity.

When Rutherstone brought up the unlaid ghost of the late Wharton Willoughby, Vreeland cynically remarked: “I naturally know nothing of local social biography here. I am only a returned borderer, and am only engaged in making a proper business use of my capital. I stand calmly in the center of your New York circus and see its ‘free show’ swing around.

“My platform is that of the late Simon Cameron of blessed memory, ‘I don’t care a damn what happens as long as it does not happen to me.’”

“But, the lady has intimate business relations with your firm!” babbled Merriman.

“Did Fred Hathorn tell you so?” cuttingly sneered Vreeland. “Perhaps not, as you fellows are only chummy with his smart wife. Let her find it out for herself, by a personal visit to the lady in question.

“You might ask Wyman—he knows all our thousand customers’ affairs. I don’t bother much with the business,” loftily remarked Vreeland, as he hummed an old music hall refrain, “You can get onto an omnibus, but you can’t get onto me.”

He cheerfully departed, leaving his hosts to “a night of memories and sighs.” He was followed with curses both deep and loud.

Vreeland put all these little matters lightly away as a part of the usual “burrowing mole” work of New York high life; but he was really astonished, a week later, when his employer’s physician, Dr. Hugo Alberg, haled him away to a confidential Sunday morning breakfast.

The “German specialist” was an indurated foreign egotist of thirty, and a cunning gleam lingered behind his golden glasses.

His fresh, bewhiskered face was slightly Semitic in its cast, and his record of prosperity was all too evident in that richness of jewelry which has been a legacy of the Biblical times when the Egyptians made such incautious loans of their ornaments.

Harold Vreeland had now an unwritten chapter in his life devoted entirely to the thirsty-hearted Justine, and from that subjugated Gallic beauty he knew of all Alberg’s crafty approaches upon the mistress by a coarsely familiar wooing of the woman who had given herself over, body and soul, to Vreeland’s service.

And so he marveled not that in the cozy private room at Martin’s the Doctor’s slim, white, “sterilized” hand reached out in the direction of a secret which Vreeland himself knew naught of.

“I’ll just let this fool talk,” mused Vreeland, as the intriguing foreigner became both familiar and friendly. “He has his own little scheme. Perhaps he may point me toward what no one seems to know.”

And so, in an affected bruderschaft, the would-be vampire listened with a beating heart to Alberg’s confidences when the strong Rhine wine had loosened the “Medical Arzt’s” slightly thickened tongue.

“We ought to understand each other, mein lieber

Vreeland,” urged the Doctor, who had now thrown the mask off. “You and I are the two men nearest to this magnificent woman. You are her confidential man of affairs.

“You know all—you must know all. And a woman’s best friend is always her Doctor,” he grinned, with a suggestive pliancy.

“We are necessary to each other. You and I only want what all New York wants—money!

“Money talks in New York. Life is a hell without money. Now, my dear friend, we are both making money out of her easily. And to me, as well as to you, Mrs. Willoughby’s life is of great importance.

“For my fee bill and your profits depend upon her being kept alive.”

Vreeland started, in a sudden alarm. “Speak out, man! What the devil do you mean?” He saw a black gulf yawning before him.

“She has some concealed source of mental trouble, some eating sorrow, some overmastering secret of her old life,” bluntly answered Alberg. “You, as a man of the world, could easily guess that such a woman should be married. She is rich, still very beautiful, young enough yet—she hardly looks thirty-three—woman’s royal epoch of mental force and bodily attractiveness. Now, she has strange periods of a profound mental depression.

“There are dark storms of sorrow. Her heart action is somewhat impaired, and the waves of passion beat too fiercely in her locked breast.

“You must help me! You may, in this way, save your own future. We must work together. Drugs will do her no good. I am at my wits’ ends!” The gloomy Doctor buried his nose again in the Rudesheimer.

“What can I do?” flatly said Vreeland. “Speak out! Don’t mince matters.”

“Find out her past social history. Find out if she ever was really married. Find out if some one has a hold on her. She is an unhappy woman at heart!” cried Alberg. “It may be that damned cold-hearted cur, Hathorn’s, desertion has cut her to the quick! Find out if she really is a free woman!”

“And, then?” said Vreeland, a strange light coming into his eyes.

“Marry her yourself,” pleaded Alberg. “She is one woman in a million! Take her away for a year. Lead her away from her old self. Pride brought low may have maddened her. I think that Hathorn first fathomed her past, and then, coldly left her for the younger and perhaps richer woman. It may have been too heavy a blow to her pride.”

“Is there anything in this babble about Endicott or the Senator?” huskily whispered Vreeland, reddening with shame in spite of himself.

The half-tipsy Doctor laughed. “The old man is only her business Mentor—he is as passionless as a basalt block.

“The Senator is but a cold-hearted money schemer, a Yankee coining power into hard cash. I’ve followed all these trails out.”

“And you yourself are absolutely in the dark?” persisted Vreeland. “I’ve thought at times that old Endicott may be the trustee under some quiet old marital separation. I’ve imagined, too, that Willoughby mari may not be really dead; that she, in spite of herself, learned to passionately love Hathorn, and has ardently desired him, and that he selfishly married after she had pulled him up to fortune, and then, left her powerless and tongue-tied, to pocket his brutal ingratitude.

“Whatever it is, we need each other, Vreeland. I will stand by you if you stand by me. Is it a bargain?”

“I’ll see you here the same time next Sunday. Let me think this thing over,” faltered Vreeland, beginning to see light at last on his way.

“I should have told you that she usually has these attacks after Endicott’s occasional long private visits. It may be that the missing husband is alive, and is bleeding her financially with extortionate demands,” was the Doctor’s last confidence.

“I’ll be ready to talk to you next Sunday. Let me go now,” breathlessly cried Vreeland. “In the meantime, keep a close silence. You will find me to be the best friend you ever had in the world.”

The schemer darted away with a sudden impulse.

Ten minutes later he sat with Justine Duprez, in a hidden little nest of her own in South Fifth Avenue. It had flashed over his mind that Mlle. Justine’s Sunday off, just suited his purpose.

It was not the first time that he had communed with her there, in a room once sacred to Frederick Hathorn’s private information bureau.

The startled maid had barely time to meet her generous new admirer when he questioned her sharply upon the subject of Doctor Alberg’s recent revelations.

And, to his annoyance, he for the first time found the Parisian woman to be obdurate. She had been curtly abandoned by Hathorn, who had forgotten to hand over her final payment in all the hurried glories of the VanSittart wedding.

She alone knew that the vain fool had stupidly imagined that Elaine Willoughby only urged on his marriage in order to be able later to cloak an intimacy which would have later made Justine’s fortune.

And now, she would not be balked out of the harvest of fortune. For an hour, the ardent Vreeland pleaded with the artful woman. Her bold eyes, dulled with the bistre stains, gleamed with triumph as he pleaded with her.

The elegant young man alternately flattered and caressed the brown-faced intrigante, whose coarse beauty had long been the toast of the cabaret which she yearned to possess in Paris.

Her voluptuous bosom and heavy haunches were the antipodes of Vreeland’s beauty ideal, and yet, he knelt to flatter and to sue. For she alone could spy upon the most sacred privacy of the woman he had sworn to rule.

Justine eyed him keenly, and spoke at last. “Give me a thousand dollars and promise that you will give me a free hand if you marry Madame,” she said, as she yielded to his self-abusing pleadings.

“And only you shall know her secrets. I hate that Doctor!” she cried. “I can find out all you want to know, but, you must do as I wish.” Her velvet eyes gleamed in a fierce flame.

“Listen, Justine,” urged Vreeland. “To-morrow I will bring you a thousand dollars when I come to the Circassia. Tell me now what you can; I swear to make you rich if you will only stand by me. It is Sunday,” he added. “No banks are open to-day. This first hundred will not count.”

And he thrust a bill into her brown hand.

“I have watched for years to find the secret of her past life,” promptly said the sly Justine, drawing nearer to Vreeland. “I, too, thought of an affaire. It is not. But, a secret there is, and only one man knows—the old lawyer. I hid myself near them on his last visit, for they talked long, and Madame fell down fainting after he had gone away.

“Their talk was of the old times, and it is always so, when they come to that. But, this time I listened carefully while she moaned in her sorrow.”

“And she said?” anxiously cried Vreeland.

“‘My child! My child! Give me back my child!’ she cried. And so there is a child, and it is not of the Senator! Voilà

! They are stupidement placide toujours! Les affaires! Only—ze monnaie! She loves him not. And only the old man knows. You shall watch him and her.”

A sudden suspicion of a feminine double life brought a name to Vreeland’s lips.

“Hathorn!” he said, with a meaning look at his partner in an already vicious intrigue. For Justine Duprez knew him in all the pliant baseness of his real nature, and they had groveled toward each other from the very first.

The Parisian gamine laughed a bitter, hard laugh.

“I have been at Madame’s side since the first day when this egoist Hathorn first met her. There has been no love, no intrigue, no child. And he—the hard-hearted brute—schemed only for her money.

“No! It is beyond me. Beyond my seven years of service. I will reach la mystère yet for you,” she smiled. “And you will perhaps find that there was ze old divorce, ze old-time scandale. And the other man, the husband, has perhaps taken away the child. The sorrow, yes; the secret d’amour, no! Elle est trop bravement bête pour l’amour à

la mode.

“

The journalist? Ah, no! Il n’est qu’un brave ami! Pas plus!” It was dark before the “rising star” dared to steal away from Justine’s little pied à terre, for too well Vreeland knew that the enraged Hathorn was shadowing his every movement.

Justine had fled away, light-hearted, after the sealing of a pact which was to lead her to the splendors of Dame du Comptoir of her own cabaret. And as Vreeland strolled homeward he summed up the situation.

“Her only friend and confidant is Endicott. No thoroughfare there. Alberg, this German brute, knows nothing and Hathorn less than nothing, or he would have already used it against her in this bitter petticoat fight.

“I will hoodwink them all. My time will come when I have gained her cherished secret. And if I do gain her secret, it will be on the market, to the highest bidder, perhaps to the dashing Alida Hathorn, or else be quietly nursed to later bring me in a fortune.” He was satisfied with his day’s work. The light was dawning now.

When the adventurer reviewed the whole situation, he felt that the mystery was as yet hidden in Elaine Willoughby’s ardent bosom. “The day will come when she will need me, when she will tell me all, when she is safe to live a free woman’s heart-life. I will wait on her and give no one my confidence.”

During the long, busy week before the Christmas holidays, Vreeland narrowly watched his strange, silent partner, Horton Wyman, to see if he were bidden to the Lakemere house party.

“He is the only one that I have to fear,” mused Vreeland, “for, with Senator Alynton’s backing and his daily intercourse with old Endicott, I would be bowled out in a moment, if I made a single misstep. Can he yearn for Elaine Willoughby’s money?”

In the daily office associations, the casual meetings at the Circassia, in the feebly maintained exchange of personal hospitalities, Horton Wyman had so far remained to him an unexplored country.

Cool, sturdy, with piercing black eyes, and a marvelous self-control, with a facial mask which even a Jesuit might have envied, Horton Wyman was seemingly devoid of any passion but money-making.

Vreeland had gained the general impression that he was “bookish,” and the silent partner avoided all show society.

Thirty-five years sat lightly on the man, whose scanty references to Senator Alynton’s millionaire father indicated that the “poor relation,” had been trained up in adversity as the dead financier’s private secretary. “He is a fellow to beware of. I’ll let him alone,” mused Vreeland.

Harold Vreeland thanked his lucky stars when Wyman drew him into his private den when the first sporadic Christmas trees were beginning to creep into Gotham.

“Well, old man,” cheerfully said Wyman, “I’m off for a two weeks’ visit to the Alyntons. Endicott will handle our Board work through his uncle’s private broker, and Maitland and Noel will take their leave after we return. I suppose that you will be at the Lakemere house party.

“Of course, there’s no need of you following up things at the office. Here’s my telegraph address, if anything turns up, and, of course, Mrs. Willoughby will call on you if she needs anything.

“We’ve got the thing running pretty smoothly, so take your full share of mistletoe. Noel tells me that all the prettiest girls in town will be up there at Lakemere.” It was a welcome relief.

“I have now a free field,” jubilantly exclaimed Vreeland. “He is as indifferent to her as if she were only a cloak model. Now, for Lakemere!”

Vreeland never stopped in his trickery to be ashamed of his low truckling with the French maid, whose malleable conscience was at his disposal, in the hopes of much future backsheesh.

And so the adroit Continental Doctor had now two false friends between him and the woman who was his “star patient” and whom he, too, intended for an innocent dupe. The fate of every rich and lonely woman!

It was under the Christmas tree at Lakemere that Harold Vreeland learned for the first time why the Queen of the Street had held him for months in a glittering quiescence in the rapidly built-up firm.

The merry guests were already assembled on the other side of the curtain when the breathless Justine drew Vreeland into a dark corner.

The French woman’s panting bosom heaved as she whispered: “She wants to see you in there, first of all. Now is your time, but don’t forget me, Harold.”

There was the pledge of an infamous pact in the meeting of their guilty eyes. Justine now stood, with flaming sword, between her secret lover and those who would approach the woman who held both their fortunes. Her dark fidelity was doubly bought.

It was a robed queen who stood waiting there by the fragrant Christmas tree and held both her hands out to Harold Vreeland. The Lady of Lakemere at her very best!

With beaming eyes, she handed him an envelope and whispered: “The time has now come when you will have your own part to play, under my sole orders.

“I know your whole record. You have been my own faithful knight.

“Listen! All these merrymakers will go away with the old year. Judge Endicott brings me the firm’s settlement papers on New Years. I will then send for you and make you my secret representative in a momentous affair.

“To protect my interests you must at once leave the Waldorf.

“Trust to me!” she smiled. “I will have your bachelor apartments ready. And no one, not even Wyman, must ever learn of your ‘secret service.’ Silence and obedience, and your fortune is assured. You alone shall battle for me and drive this fool Hathorn forever from the Street.

“Go now! You will leave with the first departing guests, but await my telegram at the Waldorf to come to me here. And so, I have your plighted word. Never a whisper to a living soul. You are to be still only the office partner—to the world!”

Vreeland snatched her trembling hand and kissed it.

It was burning in fever.

But he sped away, and before the curtain rose to a chorus of happy laughter and shouts of delighted surprise, a glance in a corner of the hallway where Justine awaited him showed him a check for twenty-five thousand dollars as his Christmas gift. His patroness had handed him the precious envelope in silence.

In a low whisper he opened the gates of paradise to the French woman, who watched her lover with flaming eyes. “Five thousand dollars of this to you, if you find out for me the secret of that child.”

And he left her, panting with the thrill of a sated avarice.

“I will go through fire and water to serve you,” she faltered. “I will steal the secret from her midnight dreams.”

That night, after the gay dances were done, when the house was stilled, Elaine Willoughby sat before her fire, while Justine laid away the regal robes.

There was the glitter of diamonds and the shimmer of pearls everywhere. With her hands clasped, the lonely mistress of Lakemere gazed into the dancing flames.

“I must crush him—to leave the past buried—that I may yet find the path trodden by those little wandering feet.

“Ah, my God!” she moaned, “it is not revenge that I want. It is love—her love—I burn to know her mine alone. And the past shall be kept as a sealed book, for her dear sake. It must be so. It is the only way. For, Vreeland is brave and true!”

The handsome hypocrite was even then dreaming of a “double event,” a duplicated prize, one beyond his wildest hopes.

“By heaven! I’ll have both her and the fortune!” His busy, familiar devil “laughed by his side.”

BOOK II—With the Current.

CHAPTER VI.

IN THE “ELMLEAF” BACHELOR APARTMENTS.

Mr. Harold Vreeland silently wondered at the protean character of womanhood as he watched Mrs. Elaine Willoughby’s almost feverish gaiety in the few days which followed their new relation. “I can believe anything of a woman’s subtle arts after this,” he wonderingly said, as he made himself a graceful factor in the joys under holly and mistletoe.

Not a single reference to the coming business had ever escaped her, and she was as merrily impartial in her favors as a girl at her first ball.

There was hardly a financier in the house party, Noel Endicott’s visit of a day being a mere duty call. “She evidently wishes to hide our intimacy from all, and to publicly impress only the social character on our friendship,” mused Vreeland.

“Lady mine! you are a deep one!” he mused. Never had he been placed next to her at dinner, and even at the cotillion’s trifling favors she had only sought him among the very last.

He was aware that all New York knew of how Hathorn had been coached up by her into financial glory. “That mistake she will not repeat. It’s a case of blood and the secret warpath, now,” reflected Vreeland.

But with the check for twenty-five thousand dollars in his pocket, he felt that his silence was paid for in advance. He was swimming gaily on with the current now.

He had calmed Dr. Hugo Alberg down into an expectant friendship by agreeing to dine with him once a week and to exchange regular reports at Martin’s.

“So far, I have found out nothing, Doctor,” said the lying Vreeland; “but I have written out West. I understand that she has immense properties in Colorado. If I get a clew, you and I will work it up together.

“In the meantime watch over her yourself, and then tell me all.”

Alberg was in high glee at his social début, and confided to Vreeland that their patroness was in the most brilliant health.

“Well,” good-humoredly answered Vreeland, “between you and me we will manage to guard her and take care of her property, if she will only let us.”

The miserly German’s eyes gleamed as they drank to their private pact.

“The great thing is to keep every one else away from her,” whispered Alberg. “I of course watch her professionally. You must keep off all those society sharks like that upstart Hathorn.”

“Trust to me. I know my business,” laughed Vreeland.

When Vreeland left Lakemere on the last day of the old year, his only reminder was the whispered word, “Remember!”

“I will wait at the Waldorf,” he answered, with a last meaning gleam in his eyes.

Standing now on an almost secure pedestal, Vreeland never dared to dream of the sentimental approach upon the woman who was now the sole arbiter of his destiny.

“That would be the clumsiest mistake of all,” he decided. “Only—when she comes into the net—I will tighten it.”

He well knew that the bachelor apartment was to be the scene of some veiled financial strategy and not a rosy Paphian bower.

Mean and low at heart as he was, he knew that her soul towered above all low deceit, as the rosy Jungfrau lifts its unsullied peaks to the blue skies.

The one rare virtue of this scoundrel in embryo was that no inane self-conceit clouded his clear and mercilessly direct reasoning.

“I am only her tool as yet,” he reflected.

“But the Endicotts, Aubrey Maitland, and Wyman are to know nothing! This, of course, excludes Senator Alynton. She trusts me then alone—of the whole world.” And so, he panted for the coming solution of the enigma.

As he departed for New York, he left one lynx-eyed aid behind him.

It was the hot-hearted Justine, who already knew what her étrennes would be—a second thousand dollars.

“Remember, my own Justine,” he urged, with glowing eyes, “I want you to earn that whole five thousand dollars. Spy on Alberg.

“He is only a fool. But catch every whisper of this wary old Endicott. He alone knows what you must learn. There lies your fortune—in those pretty ears.”

“I have made my plan,” smilingly whispered the brown-skinned maid. “I am going to earn that money. Remember, I am vraie Française!”

There were but two plausible explanations of Madonna’s strangely secret course. Some “deed without a name” was in the plot.

And none of her old friends, no one of the financial world, not even her advisers, tried and true, were to share the secret of the two for whom the “bachelor apartment” was to be the veiled headquarters.

“Either Hathorn has surprised the secret of her early life and spirited away her child, hoping to have drawn her down to his will, or—can it be that she means to sell out the sugar syndicate?”

He gazed reflectively at the winter landscape flying by, as he pondered over the first. “No!” was his correct deduction. “Hathorn is powerless. He would surely have held on to her business, by fear or force, and gained the inside track in the great gamble, Sugar.

“He would have bent her to his will, and carried on the old hideous gilded sin—to make his light o’ love his young wife’s best friend.

“That’s quite fin de siècle in New York, they tell me.

“His crime was only the bull-headed folly of preferring another and a younger woman to the one woman whom he could have gratefully and logically married.

“There is a man’s fatuous vanity to look for her support in chasing down a younger and prettier rival under her very eyes. And yet, she hastened on the marriage. By Jove! she did. It’s a mystery to me!”

The puzzled schemer never knew of the real foundation of his own blossoming fortunes.

The lightning flashes of Elaine Willoughby’s mad anger came when Judge Endicott had found out that Frederick Hathorn was secretly shadowing his loving and trusting employer and tracing back her past life. Then, Elaine Willoughby became a wolf on the trail.

All of social life is but a hoodman blind game. The stern old lawyer was only carrying out a secret quest, and he could not divine that Hathorn’s real object was to trace down to a direct connection Elaine Willoughby’s secret alliance with the heads of the great Sugar Trust. It was but a mean money greed, after all.

Keenly alive to every pointer of the Street, Hathorn had not learned, for all his five years of florid devotion, that his lovely patroness had sealed that one treasured secret in her soul. And, meanly, he had tried to dig under her mines. But it was the thirst for gold alone that fired his veins.

Hiram Endicott alone knew of the coolly-devised scheme by which the woman whom he had deceived had made Hathorn’s marriage and enforced absence the epoch for a complete break-off of all business relations.

But she, deluded, as even the keenest mortals are, in stocks, love, or war, only feared for the one darling secret of her heart—that veiled sorrow which lay behind Hiram Endicott’s useless search of years.

And in the defense of that one pure and unsullied memory, she would have torn herself from Hathorn’s arms even at the altar. For there is a love which can tear the face of any man from a true woman’s heart—the mother love.

Before Harold Vreeland reached New York he had decided upon the “Sugar speculations” as the secret reason for setting up the “bachelor apartment.”

It was now a matter of gossip on the Street that the great Standard Oil Company was reaching its octopus arms out for “safe investments,” as well as sure new speculative fields.

To use a huge surplus of idle money and an inexhaustible credit, it was rumored that they proposed to sneak into a quiet mastery of the American Sugar Refinery Company’s outside stock, and even in time to gather in all the great Gas monopolies of Manhattan Island.

“That’s my lady’s game!” gleefully cried Vreeland. “She could crush Hathorn at will. Their business is ruined. The ugly rumors as to his shabby behavior to her have hurt that firm.

“And Potter, too, is about to draw out. Wolfe has no money to speak of. ‘Missie VanSittart’ will not pay her husband’s stock losses, not she.”

Harold Vreeland grinned, for the young woman’s name was even now lightly bandied by the club jackals, but only sotto voce, in deference to her social rank.

“That’s her little game! She dares not let Alynton know that she proposes to dally with the other side in this coming fight of giants.

“She proposes to ‘copper’ the game of ‘more sweetness and light,’ as well as play it for a sure winner.

“And I am to be her left hand, and the right (our firm) is to be ignorant of what the left doeth!”

He was well aware that in some way she was always early possessed of all the Sugar Syndicate secrets. Whether Endicott, Alynton, the statesman, or Conyers was her coach, he knew not.

“Perhaps all three—the law, the senate, and journalism,” he grinned.

“Or, is she going to betray these people to the newcomers? There would be enormous profits in that ‘sweet surrender.’

“I shall enjoy the run, and be in at the death,” he gaily cried, as he sought his hotel in a vastly enhanced good humor.

When he entered the Waldorf, a sudden encounter made him think that angels of light had invaded the crepuscular gloom of the long hall in the early winter evening.

He scarcely credited his senses when Mrs. Frederick Hathorn motioned him to a corner of the Turkish room, after his startled but gravely polite salute.

The lady was a ravishing example of the “survival of the fittest” in the line of Worth, Pingât, and Redfern.

With a wave of her slender hand she swept away the flood of easy lies that were trembling on his lips, and then, her bright eyes, deep and searching, seemed to delve into his very soul.

“Remember, you need not answer, if you don’t care to; but you must give me the right to feel that you are a gentleman. My husband’s enemies may or may not be mine!” She burned a Parthian glance into his trembling heart.

“Why did you conceal from him that you were going into banking, and let him go on and parade you as his best friend, and all that?” she curtly demanded.

“Mrs. Hathorn,” earnestly pleaded the accomplished liar, “another man had my promise of partnership long before I left Montana. He was already making arrangements as to offices and several confidential matters on which our firm’s future depended.

“I was only asked to give your husband an answer on October 1st.

“And I did give one early enough—a friendly declination—which your husband made me repeat too forcibly. You should not blame me for our little estrangement.”

“And you did not scheme to supplant him with—with—”

“One word, Madame,” meaningly said Vreeland. “I have opened my heart to you. Noblesse oblige! Your question was one I could honorably answer, just as I could not honorably forewarn men whom fate had made our business rivals.

“Remember, all’s fair in love, stocks, and war. And it’s every man for himself in New York.”

“And every woman, too,” added Mrs. Alida, with a little snaky smile.

“I always liked you,” she hesitatingly said, and then, her eyes dropped before the ardent and merciless gaze of a man who now saw “a new way to pay old debts.”

“Then let me volunteer a hint that I have never supplanted your husband with anyone nor sought to. My capital alone gives me weight in our firm. I have never even opened a ledger or made an individual transaction.

“Pride and old comradeship should temper each other in your husband. I have only avoided the distressing embarrassments which he alone has brought upon himself, and you will always find me your secret friend, though I can not seek you out in this witches’ parade of Gotham. You know all the reasons why I can not range myself openly at your side.” His devilish familiar was now whispering in his ear.

The victim was young, fair, and foolish.

The luxurious woman sighed. All her allures had been baffled.

“If I should need to tax your friendship?” she slowly said, her breathing quick and fierce, telling of her agitation.

It was now Vreeland’s eyes which “burned into her spirit’s core.”

“Yes; if you make the place where we can meet without a foolish risk and placing us both in a false position.”

He glanced around the debatable ground of the Turkish room. Any notable, from Chauncey Depew down to the last “Western bonanza beauty,” might surprise them there at any moment.

“Will you come, if you need me?” he whispered, taking her hand, with insidious suggestion.

“Perhaps,” she faltered, with pale and trembling lips, and when he looked up he was alone, but a knot of lilies of the valley from her corsage lay in his hand.

He dreamed strange dreams that night, for he well knew of the seraglio secrets of the bachelor apartments of New York.

He knew the light vanity that might lead her feet to the “Castle Dangerous” to solve the riddle which was as yet a mystery to himself.

But he whistled “Donna è Mobile” very contentedly, as he awoke to find a telegram on New Year’s morning from his sly partner in an already plotted treason. Justine’s words were pithy, and Justine was on guard.

“Watch in South Fifth Avenue for news!”

The simple signature J followed the words: “Lawyer here. See me first on your arrival.”

“I think that I am a pretty lucky devil,” was the flattering unction with which Vreeland regaled his soul, as he drove down to Wall Street and found the two responsible men there on duty.

Noel Endicott, with Aubrey Maitland, were in a secret junta busily opening the new set of books.

The finely assumed carelessness of Vreeland covered his desire to trace and locate the only man he feared—Mr. Horton Wyman.

“Just write your dispatch,” calmly said Endicott. “I’ll send it down to Washington to Alynton’s private secretary, and you’ll have Wyman’s answer at once. They are inspecting some of Alynton’s West Virginia properties.”

And, in truth, an open answer to Vreeland’s holiday greeting was at the Waldorf when the schemer finished his New Year’s dinner, and slipped out to visit the lair where a wrinkled hag guarded Justine Duprez’ convenient pied à terre.

He marveled long over a second dispatch which awaited him there. Its words were ominous, and yet, Elaine Willoughby was firm and steadfast in her purpose.

“She has been greatly excited. Doctor Alberg has been telegraphed for. You are to come to-morrow. Lawyer leaves to-night. Dare not communicate by letter. I have the most important news.”

And all night Harold Vreeland was tossed about in a vain unrest.

He knew that his greedy accomplice Justine would easily handle and draw out Alberg, for, not of a jealous disposition, Vreeland was perfectly willing that the doctor should be made a tool of the facile Parisienne.

“You know how to lead him on, Justine,” was Vreeland’s easy-going hint, whereat the demure maid dropped her lashes and smiled. And after all, even the artful Justine was only means to an end.

The recurring excitement of the tortured lonely rich woman was only a new phase of the old invincible mystery. “Can it be a gigantic game of blackmail, the infamous price of someone’s silence—the bribe to her quiet enjoyment of a station not her own? What hideous Frankenstein hides behind the dropped arras of her life?”

Vreeland knew how many dark shadows lurked behind the bright curtains of New York’s Belgravia and Mayfair.

“By God! I shall know soon!” he growled, as the second day of the new year brought him the dispatch confirming Justine’s watchful foresight. There was no uncertain ring to the words of the Lady of Lakemere.

“Come to me at once! Immediate action necessary!”

“It seems to be something recurrent—something, too, that even golden-massed money can not help! She would quickly brush this trouble away, if the ‘long green’ would do it. And, it must be something which that old fox, Endicott, can not help, or he would stay up there on guard and help it, instead of leaving her to Dr. Hugo Alberg’s chloral, chlorodyne, and phenacetine. There must be an ugly snarl—some olden shame, some hidden disgrace.”

Vreeland very well knew that the sly German practitioner’s drugs had brought his patient “no surcease of sorrow,” but only “pushed the clouds along” to a new day of reactionary misery. For, the proud heart was sealed and yet surcharged almost to its breaking.

“I wonder what our opinion of each other would be if we all had to walk abroad with our life stories openly branded on our faces?” mused the anxious Vreeland, as he drove away to the station. The flying wheels of the coupé seemed to clatter “Not much! Not much! Nothing at all!” He meanly believed all men and women to be as base at heart as himself.

“Thank Fortune for the decent lies of a smooth appearance and a still tongue!” was the schemer’s cheering conclusion, as he finally dismissed all vain moralizing, and then, wondered how he would meet the crafty Justine first, and so be able to gain her budget of stolen tidings before he faced the watchful Lady of Lakemere.

The provokingly suggestive face of the French woman met him at the front door, on his arrival. “I am to see that you have your breakfast,” she smilingly said, “while Doctor Alberg, now upstairs, prepares Madame for your visit!”

And, as she drew him into a coign of vantage, she whispered, “He is now my very slave! For he, too, is hunting for an ally, and I had him all to myself last evening! Now for the news! You can afford to be liberal to me!”

Her eyes were beaming with that vicious triumph of an unfaithful underling discovering the naked soul of her helpless mistress.

The household traitor is the lowest of all human spawn.

“Tell me everything,” was Vreeland’s hurried response. “When I marry her, I will be the King of the Street, and you shall stay with us as long as you wish—it will be always the same between us.”

The woman’s gleaming eyes softened in a glow of triumph.

“And, your house at Paris shall be my pied à terre. But, give me every word—remember!”

His bosom was rent with thronging hopes and fears.

Justine smiled, as she pressed herself close to the handsome scoundrel.

“It is a bargain, then. I will hold you to every word, and I will never let you go. How I secreted myself so as to hear them, is my own business. But I did. In their fear of Doctor Alberg, whom Endicott heartily despises, they fell easily into my hands. There was much talk of the child—a girl—a missing girl—her child—but no time or age was given—no whisper of the father’s name.”

Justine paused, while Vreeland hoarsely whispered, “Go on! Go on! Quick! She may send any moment for me, now!”

“It appears she had placed her child, to get rid of it, in a ‘private Orphan Asylum’ here, in the city. Just why—I can not tell. But, they have lost all traces of the girl.

“The old man said, ‘I have followed up every “private inquiry” possible, since your orders of last summer. These detective fellows all come to me for their money on the New Year. Now you must be brave, Elaine,’ he said, and I could hear her choking sobs.

“‘I have very bad news.’

“‘She is dead?’ almost screamed Madame.

“From my little peep-hole, I could see the old lawyer take her hands.

“‘We have been led away on a blind trail. And I have only just now found the right one—but to lose it forever, I fear. For one of my best agents has discovered that Doctor McLloyd’s private Orphan Asylum was chased out of New York City by some angry rivals, and a bevy of too inquisitive reporters.

“‘The Doctor was making money too fast, and there was a very suspicious mortality among the little girls. It reappeared as the “House of the Good Samaritan,” at a little village in Westchester County. The old Doctor has gone either to his reward, or punishment. Probably, the latter.

“‘But the sly hypocrite who sported a D. D., as well as a medical title, left the Westchester property to a buxom grass widow, who long officiated as his matron.

“‘This woman is now forty years old—well-to-do—and is married to a thrifty young farmer—a man who is not particular as to how she earned the handsome property which they enjoy.’

“Mrs. Willoughby was softly sobbing when he finished.

“‘By the lavish use of money and a compact of immunity, she agreed to privately examine the books and records. Of course she has not got them. “It is a friend—and so on.” We did not dare to force her. For, she is a very sly bird.

“‘She was only twenty-two when she eased the good Doctor’s lonely hours, and she is a remarkably cool hand at the game of life.’

“The old man sighed, as he said, ‘It appears that the enthusiastic childless woman, who first adopted the child, died in two years after your babe was taken away from the “private Orphan Asylum,” and, as her young husband remarried in a year, he brought the pretty child back and left her again on McLloyd’s hands—with a handsome present.

“‘The girl was a beautiful three-year-old fairy, and the “matron” remembers her especially. But, McLloyd, always anxious for profit, gave her to the first decent applicants, a respectable childless couple, from Western New York.

“‘Under the name of “Alva Whiting”—full orphan—she was sent away for the second time.

“‘I must find her! You must advertise!’ cried Madame.

“‘Ah!’ said the old lawyer. ‘There is no hope. The young widower came back, after his second wedding was all safe, returning from a three years’ visit in Europe. By a strange chance, his later union was also childless.

“‘Rich, and now thoroughly independent, he, too, wished to trace “Alva Whiting,” and to reclaim her.

“‘But the matron says that even the wily McLloyd, tempted by a handsome reward, failed to find her. The Western New York people may have given a false name, to prevent the child from ever knowing that she was not their own.

“‘That is all—the matron would gladly earn our offered money—she knows nothing.

“‘And now, God alone can, in his infinite mercy, ever reclaim “Alva Whiting.”

“‘I have tried to induce this woman to meet me. She flatly told my agent that she would have all the books burned—and then, deny everything—if her prosperous middle age was connected with old McLloyd’s baby farm. She cried, “I’m as fond of money as anyone—but there’s the end of it.”

“‘No more would she say. I fear there is no hope.’ The old lawyer was almost in tears, as he saw Madame’s sufferings.

“Now,” whispered Justine, “I merely saved my place by that agility of body which you have so often praised. When Madame fell in a dead faint, and the old lawyer screamed for help, I just ran around the hall, knocking over a table, and—the rest has been left in Doctor Alberg’s hands. So, you now know all.” The schemer’s brain was working like lightning as they parted in silence.

After the breakfast, it was Justine who conducted Vreeland to Madame Willoughby’s morning room—but not until Doctor Alberg had first waylaid him.

“The same old mystery!” the German sighed.