and, watchfully jealous of that dimpled star, Stella Knox, had quickly effected a truce, of an amatory character, with the loved and lost Jimmie Potter, who had lived to learn that her heart was “a bicycle made for two”—if not more.
“After the ball,” Potter ostentatiously lingered to smoke a last weed with Vreeland, who had opened for him alone the last unprofaned corner of his domain—that Bluebeard chamber which was “strictly business.” He knew that Potter was secret, safe, and gamely silent.
“Ah! my boy!” sighed Potter. “I see how you carry on your own private plunging. What a fool Hathorn was—to quarrel with the Willoughby!
“Now that I’m out I don’t mind to tell you that the old firm is going downhill very fast. Hathorn lost his luck when he cut the golden cord.
“I can’t make him out. He has grown strangely reckless and haggard.
“And the wife is, to say the least, un peu insouciante. You know of that little yacht racket?”—and he whispered a few telling words.
“Well! Alida Hathorn was the Veiled Lady. I have it from the man who is to be the sailing master of the ‘Aphrodite’ next year.
“And the blinded Hathorn is obstinately shadowing Mrs. Willoughby, still following up her game, digging up her past, and backing up all his wife’s acidulated slanders.
“When I found this to be a truth, and saw these damned guttersnipe Hawkshaws slipping in and out of his private office, I decided to quietly withdraw—for a quieter and a gamer woman never drew breath than Elaine Willoughby.
“I wish to God that I had married Alida,” burst out the honest reveler, whose relaxed nerves had unsealed the fountains of truth. “For now, I fear, she will be every man’s woman—if she don’t pull up. She’s left all alone, and Hathorn’s one idea is revenge upon Elaine Willoughby.