And, when the sunset of the next day came, Mr. Harold Vreeland had dispatched the acute Bagley to Boston with a “valuable package” to be deposited in a Safe Deposit Company there, and he was seated in his own room gazing tenderly upon the crimsoned flowers whose mute incense filled the air.
The crawling hands of the clock were a torture to the man whose darkest purpose was now hidden behind a smiling face—for it is not often given, even to a smooth scoundrel, to betray two women at once. He was swimming in a sea of glory, now.
Vreeland slept but little after his conference with his resolute and beautiful patroness. He had scanned her face keenly to see the “sweet unrest of Love,” or the play of a hidden passion written there, but all that the keen schemer could discern was the calmness of a settled purpose, the poise of an unshaken self-control.
“She has either no heart, or else, a marvelous power of dissimulation,” he wearily decided. He felt that she was playing some great hidden game in which he was but a mere pawn, a poor private soldier in the fight.
“It’s a waiting game,” he rightly concluded, “but, it is for vengeance, or a fight to cover up her clouded past.”
He knew now that Elaine Willoughby was victorious over her young social enemy at every point of the field. For, the house of Hathorn was known to be divided against itself, and the once magnificent Frederick’s careworn brow showed a sullen discontent.
Hathorn’s disgruntled face was now too often reflected in the mirrors of the Café Savarin bar; he was shunned at the clubs even by the young flâneurs
who had now gone over bodily to Mrs. Willoughby, and the little Sunday afternoon séances at Mrs. Alida Hathorn’s became noted for their daring camaraderie and the “high class vaudeville” enacted there.
Hathorn was now more frequently absent from town “upon business,” and Vreeland wrongly suspected him of tracing down the past antecedents of “his dearest foe.”
“What the old Harry did she throw him over and pick me up for?” he vainly pondered. “She may have found him creeping too closely on her track and perhaps she feared him.