“And for her sake, he bitterly hates you. Look out for him. For he has lost all self-control. You are wise to play your outside game here in safety. Hathorn would not hesitate to bribe your own people.
“I know he had that big lump of deviltry, Justine Duprez, in his pay. He even took her over to Paris the summer Mrs. Willoughby went out to Colorado. I’m glad I’m out of the stock business. You’ll tire of it, and with your money why do you fool with it?”
The young Crœsus arose unsteadily, and said, “Come to breakfast with me at the Union to-morrow—that is to say, to-day,” he chuckled. “Well, let us have one hour’s poker—you and me—and with no limit—just for fun.
“You owe me a revenge. Now, remember—I have warned you. Look out that Hathorn don’t get onto your little game—dig a pit—and drop you in it.
“He’s grown to be an ether drinker now, and his wife is as cold-hearted an egoist as breathes. Just dead gone on herself—and her own pretty bodily mechanism. If he ever gets in an ugly money corner, she won’t give him a sou marqué.
“Now, Elaine Willoughby has ‘held up her end of the log’ against some of the stiffest men in Wall Street. She is smarter than a whole stack of Hathorns. I know in the outside companies that I am director of, she has loads of the best paying permanent investments.
“And if she ever catches Hathorn nosing into her affairs, or yours, for I know your firm does a part of her business, she will smash up Fred Hathorn like the ‘Mary Powell’ going over a rowboat.”
With an affected unconcern, Vreeland saw his friend disappear in a night hour club coupé, after swearing fidelity to the poker tryst.
But his heart was beating wildly, as he crawled upstairs in the gray of the dawn. “That’s her game; defense and revenge! I wonder if Hathorn really traced her out to Colorado, and has he an inkling of Alva Whiting?
“He’s not above levying a blackmail. And I am in some strange way her pawn in this veiled duel to the death, a duel between a man and woman who may have often rested in each other’s arms with vows of deathless love.