“More time. More time,” he murmured. “If I could find some way to gain her personal confidence. Flowers, books, little attentions, a stray set of theatre or opera tickets. For she is, after all, only a woman. Fit to reign, royal in youth, and serving without stooping.
“I must see Miss Marble. The ice once broken, perhaps—”
He mused long upon an ingenious plan to “brighten the life” of the woman he would use as a tool. “Yes, it can be done, easily, through the Marble.” And he knew that veteran traitress would aid him for money.
The week before the day of Mrs. Willoughby’s ceremonial dinner was wasted by Vreeland in some amateur detective work. Miss Justine Duprez easily diagnosed the growing friendship of the two young girls.
For Miss Garland’s sweet, tender face was already familiar in the little household where Mary Kelly’s mother watched and wondered from what fairyland this bright-faced nymph had descended.
A stout school lad of sixteen was an efficient home escort for the young neophyte in New York, and pride filled the eyes of Mary Kelly’s brother.
Vreeland felt all the growing charm of the steadfast girl’s influence, her cultured manners, her dainty refinement and the rare delicacy of her language and taste. He valued her as of superior clay.
“Not of common stock,” he murmured as he deftly trod along her path, with a veiled impatience. He was deep now in the last details of a plan which busied Justine Duprez, for the coming of the second Senator, the open splendors of the grand dinner party as elaborated by Justine warned him that if he would cut the secret channels so vital to his success, he must bring the janitor and postal carriers of the “Circassia” under control.
Justine, checking his headlong impatience, only smiled her velvety smile and whispered, “Give me some money to hoodwink them a little. Wait only for a few days, and trust to me. Have I ever failed you?”
When the “rising and successful man,” Mr. Harold Vreeland, dressed himself with unusual distinction for Mrs. Willoughby’s regal dinner party of twenty, there was all the happiness of a new-born hope in his heart. For he was nearly ready now “to move on the enemy’s works.”