The overjoyed scoundrel cried: “Potter was right, after all. Everything comes round to the man who waits.”
For a study of the great journals told him of a forthcoming report fixing the policy of the Government upon the tariff.
“If she has the secret, she will surely act upon it,” he cried. “That ties her to the great Sugar Trust’s secret service. Perhaps he trusts her on account of the old love.
“Justine shall wrest the proofs from her by either fair means or foul. And, as for to-morrow night—” His lips were parched and dry as he thought of the light foot slipping up the stairway of the Elmleaf—“not with Mrs. McMorris!” He seemed to be wrapped in a golden whirlwind of success.
“If she comes once when she wishes to, she will come again when I wish her to!” gloated the schemer, whose mind was now fixed upon detaching Bagley upon some trumped-up errand and making such a feast as “Rose in bloom” laid out when the hoodwinked “Shah Jehan” was “away” at his palace of Ispahan.
“I now hold the cards, and I shall be the victor at last in this game of life,” he swore, as he dreamed of those pleading moonlight eyes.
Harold Vreeland waited for two days in a fever of excitement for some mandate from his artful patroness. “She is a sly one at heart, after all, is Mme. Elaine,” he growled. “Her stay ‘at Pittsburg’ is only to throw me off my guard, and perhaps Hathorn.
“She may have taken any one of a dozen short roads to steal back from her rendezvous with her senatorial confidant. Friend or lover—which?”
He groaned in helpless rage. His mean spirit, his hidden vicious agnosticism, made him doubt every woman.
To him they were all the same! The biting words of that crooked, malignant genius, Pope, came back: “Every woman is at heart a rake.”