Only Susan suspected the true state of affairs, being a woman. Having had no real romance herself, she delighted in having a second-hand one, as you might say. She intercepted many a glance and pretended not to see the stolen hand pressures. The wedding was already full drawn in her mind's eye. These two young people should be married at Susan Farlow's when the roses were climbing up the sides of the house and the young robins were boldly trying their fuzzy wings. It struck her as rather strange, but she could not conjure up (at this wedding) more than two men besides the minister, the bridegroom and the butler.
By forsaking his accustomed haunts, under the advice of Jones, the hidden warfare ceased temporarily. You can't very well kill a man when you don't know where to find him. He ate his breakfasts haphazardly, now here, now there. He received most of his assignments by telephone and wrote his stories and articles in his club, in the writing rooms of hotels, and invariably despatched them to the office by messenger. The managing editor wanted to know what all this meant; but Norton declined to tell him.
It irked him to be forced to rearrange his daily life—his habits. It was a revolution against his ease, for he loved ease when he was not at work. He had the sensation of having been suddenly robbed of his home, of having been cast out into the streets. And on top of all this he had to go and fall in love!
There was no longer a shadow opposite the apartments of the Countess Perigoff. Braine came and went nightly without discovering any one. This rather worried him. It gave him the impression that the shadow had found out what he had been seeking and no longer needed to watch the coming and going of either himself or the Countess Perigoff.
"Olga, it looks as if we were at the end of our rope," he said discouragedly. "We have failed in our attempts so far. The devil watches over that girl."
"Or God," replied the countess gloomily. In nearly every instance their success has been due to chance. "Somehow I'm convinced that we began wrong. We should have let Hargreave escape quietly, followed him, and made him fast when the right opportunity came. After a month or so his vigilance would have relaxed; he would have arrived at the belief that he had eluded us."
"Indeed!" ironically. "He wasn't vigilant all these years in which he did elude us. How about the child he never sought but guarded? Vigilance! He never was anything else all these seventeen years. The truth is, success has developed a coarseness in our methods. And now it is too late for finesse. We have tried every device we can think of; and there they are—the girl free, Norton unharmed, and the father as secure in his retreat as though he wore an invisible cloak. My head aches. I have ceased to be inventive."
THEY WERE TO BE MARRIED