In the haste of his feverish stock gambling, he had only time to order this happily discovered nonpareil to await his pleasure.
“Keep her with you. Give her a month’s salary, in advance. Accept my check sent by messenger as your commission. Will call soon.” So he had telegraphed in reply to the adroit Miss Marble, and dashed off a check for a round sum—a sum which clearly indicated to the overjoyed Miss Marble, the nature of the “discretionary advice” which she was to give to the beautiful neophyte in New York’s fiercest glitter.
Harold Vreeland, with a pale face, sat on watch in his own room, his eyes glued upon the features of Mary Kelly as she recorded each momentous message from the strange woman at the Circassia who was now playing a gigantic game.
An influx of bank and stock private confidential messengers, the evening conferences with Elaine Willoughby, and a breathless study of check book stubs “delivery and statements,” pressed him, while the pale-faced woman near him, cut out every lurid article of the daily journals describing the cyclonic rise and fall of the price of Sugar Certificates now heaving in a storm of unrest as sweeping as the Bay of Fundy’s tides.
Below, in the noisy street, the newsboys bawled “extras,” while all the hotels, clubs and money marts were thronged with excited babblers.
For three days, the corridors of the New York Stock Exchange were crowded with men whose vulpine faces were either hardened by despair, or else excitedly gleaming with the flush of victory.
Broad and Wall streets were filled with excited crowds, while in the galleries, the clients, reporters and money-betting public watched the members on the floor struggling over Sugar.
From ten to three daily the heat of battle was on, and, even after dark the duels of winner and loser were transferred “uptown.”
In the Consolidated Petroleum and Stock Exchange a mad riot reigned, intensified by the vociferous dealings of the crowding “curb-stone” brokers.
With a cowardice newly born of his mean treason, Harold Vreeland trembled as he crept out of the “Elmleaf,” during the three days to steal into a decorous-looking private residence near, where from ten to three with her eyes glittering with a fierce excitement, Alida Hathorn sat in a rear parlor, guarded by the all too accommodating Mrs. Volney McMorris cozily ensconced