“She is the very woman,” he mused. “The woman of my dreams.”
Afar, uptown, in the shaded boudoir of her pleasaunce palace, Elaine Willoughby dropped the newspaper from her hands. “I am safe at last. He is a criminal fugitive.
“And, now, to plead to God for the return of my child.”
CHAPTER IX.
SENATOR ALYNTON’S COLLEAGUE.
An exciting month had slipped away after the sudden Sugar flurry in Wall Street which had filled its gray granite channels with lame and dead ducks.
Seated in his cozy morning room at the “Elmleaf,” Mr. Harold Vreeland was reflectively watching the snowflakes whirled by a March storm in fluffy white eddies, and furtively gazing askance upon the beautiful face of Romaine Garland at his side.
“Where have I seen that face before?” he mused, as the lovely stenographer arose with a silent bow, and passed through the half-open door to seat herself at her typewriting table, en vis-à-vis with Mary Kelly nodding over her clicking telegraph instrument.
There was ample time for Vreeland to attend to his growing personal correspondence in these long mornings when he awaited the next secret orders of his patroness. But, a singular social and speculative lethargy now seemed to have seized upon Mrs. Elaine Willoughby. The nearness of Lent, the reaction of the giddy winter social season, and the cares of a large property all contributed to keep the woman who had fought Alida Hathorn to a finish, out of the garish glare of show society.
All the news that Vreeland could gain from the watchful Doctor Alberg and the pliant Justine was, that the Lady of Lakemere was seemingly drifting into a settled melancholy. Vreeland was astonished at the dead water into which he himself had glided. His afternoons were regularly spent now at the Wall Street office, where Wyman was busied with the “legitimate.”