“By Jove! I have found them all to be living behind imitation fronts,” he snarled.
He was seated in his office watching the pale-faced and silent Mary Kelly, when a street messenger arrived with a card sealed in an ordinary telegraph envelope.
It bore only these words, scrawled by the artful Frenchwoman: “Come over to the room.”
Stealing a watchful glance at the silent girl in the office, Vreeland hastened away. He had never been able to approach the slightest intimacy with the gray-eyed Irish-American girl.
“Her convent shyness backs up her convent modesty,” sneered Vreeland, who dared not covertly insult his patroness’ protégé.
Plaintively handsome, her steadfast eyes gleaming with a patient resignation, the pale cheeks and slender form told of a life of semi-invalidism. When not employed on her fashionable master’s business, she was ever busied copying literary manuscripts or legal documents.
“She’s another cool hand,” vulgarly imagined the upstart schemer.
“She knows that she is safe as long as Mrs. Willoughby is at the other end of that private wire.
“But, perhaps this Daly, the Roundsman, may some day bring a glow to those cheeks. They are all alike—mistress and maid—here in hot-hearted, wicked New York.
“This one’s only a neat, sly little sneak, and a spy on me.”