There was no “stock plunging” for two long weeks, as the illness of Mrs. Willoughby dragged on, and Martha Wilmot was well across the seas before the police of New York City had ceased to blunder around after the ungrateful nurse who had seemingly robbed her benefactor’s office and then decamped.
Mr. Harold Vreeland was astounded at the golden sunshine of Senator James Garston’s favors which followed on that luncheon at the Plaza Hotel which had made him a sworn knight in the rosy chains of Miss Katharine VanDyke Norreys.
There was little to do, for the market was quiescent.
Miss Mary Kelly’s desk, too, was vacant, for she lay at home ill with a fever, and it was at the side of the girl’s sick-bed that Mrs. Elaine Willoughby, still feeble and shaken in soul, suddenly seized a photograph from the mantel. “Whose picture is this?” she cried, her voice trembling in the throes of an emotion which swept her loving soul with wonderment and a new hope.
BOOK III—On a Lee Shore.
CHAPTER XI.
MISS MARBLE’S WATERLOO!—A LOST LAMB!—HER VACANT CHAIR.—SENATOR GARSTON’S DISCLOSURE.—SARA CONYERS’ MISSION.—MISS GARLAND’S DISHONORABLE DISCHARGE.—A DEFIANCE TO THE DEATH.—“ROBBED!”
In the two weeks after the successful affixing of those snake-like coils of wire which led the private messages of Mme. Elaine Willoughby into janitor Helms’ guarded private apartment, Mr. Harold Vreeland had effected a thorough understanding with that worthy. The trapping devices worked to a charm. All was now ready for a final betrayal.
Secure in his autocratic rule, August Helms buried his shock head in the beer seidl and tyrannized with a good-humored roughness over the cringing tradesmen visiting the Circassia, and, a greedy gossip, he made his “coign of vantage” a warm nook for letter-carrier and policeman and the high class “upper servants” of the families who lived above him, in a royal Americanized luxury in that great social fortress, the Circassia. Helms was a modern tyrant.