"Would you like to go with her, Florence?" asked Jones, with a shy glance at the strange doctor. The shy glance was wasted. The doctor evinced no sign that it mattered one way or the other to him.
"It is nothing very serious now," he volunteered. "But it may turn out serious if it is not taken care of at once."
"What is the trouble?" inquired Jones, who was growing fond of Susan.
"Weak heart. Sunshine and good sea air will strengthen her up again. No, no!" as Jones drew forth his wallet. "I'll send in my bill the first of the month. Sunshine and sea air; that's all that's necessary. And now, good day."
All very businesslike; not the least cause in the world for any one to suspect that a new trap was being set by the snarers. The maid returned to the sewing-room, while Florence coddled her companion and made much of her.
Jones was suspicious, but dig in his mind as he would he could find no earthly reason for this suspicion save that this attribute was now instinctive, that it was always near the top. If Susan was ill she must be given good care; there was no getting around this fact. Later, he telephoned several prominent physicians. The strange doctor was recommended as a good ordinary practitioner and in good standing; and so Jones dismissed his suspicions as having no hook to hang them on.
His hair would have tingled at the roots, however, had he known that this same physician was one of the two who had signed the document which had accredited Florence with insanity and had all but succeeded in making a supposition a fact. Nor was Jones aware of the fact that the telephone wire had been tapped recently. So when he finally concluded to permit Florence to accompany Susan to Atlantic City he telephoned to the detective agency to send up a trusty man, who was shadowed from the moment he entered the Hargreave home till he started for the railway station. He became lost in the shuffle and was not heard from till weeks later, in Havana. The Black Hundred found a good profit in the shanghaing business.
Susan began to pick up, as they say, the day after the arrival at Atlantic City, due, doubtless, to the cessation of the poison she had been taking unawares. The two young women began to enjoy life for the first time since they had left Miss Farlow's. They were up with the sun every day and went to bed tired but happy. No one bothered them. If some stray reporter encountered their signatures on the hotel register, he saw nothing to excite his reportorial senses. All this, of course, was due to Norton's policy of keeping the affair out of the papers.
Following Jones' orders, they made friends with none. Those about the hotel—especially the young men—when they made any advances were politely snubbed. Every night Florence would write to her good butler to report what had taken place during the day, and he was left to judge for himself if there was anything to arouse his suspicions. He, of course, believed the two were covertly guarded by the detective he had sent after them.
When Braine called on Olga he found his doctor there.