“Easy enough,” lightly cried Vreeland, reaching for his hat and cane. “Take two or three days. Go over the whole field of your most promising applicants. Have say, four or five of them here to meet me when you are ready.
“You can indicate the one whom you would prefer. Find out all their private histories, as far as you can get at it,” he uneasily laughed.
“I will call in, of course, by hazard, and then take a look at them. You can then have the one whom we decide upon, meet me as your only candidate. The rest you can leave to me. If the first one is not suitable, we will follow on down the list.
“Remember, salary is no object. I am liberal in all things, especially, as to your commission.”
For once in her artful career, Miss Joanna Marble infused a real warmth into the clasp of her clammy hand.
For these two read between the lines of each other’s impassive faces.
“A very fine man—the sort of man likely in time, to get shot or lynched, down South,” mused the veteran Miss Marble, “as near a sleek human wolf in sheep’s clothing as they put them up.”
And, then, Joanna Marble carefully indited a dragnet advertisement which next day brought a shoal of young womanhood to the breakers of her woman trap.
There was “the solemn silence of the night,” the “speaking silence of a dream,” at ten o’clock, as the waiting Harold Vreeland listened with a beating heart behind the portals of his aerial den in the Elmleaf.
That gliding step came at last. “Soft as the dews that fell that night,” was the footfall of the Lady of the Red Rose when très discretement vêtue, in shrouding black, with her face swathed in an impermeable veil, Alida Hathorn glided into his room, and coolly threw aside her hat and wraps.