His round, gray-blue eye twinkled as Justine Duprez would slyly slip in and read off the printed tape of the Wheatstone instrument, a duplicate sender and receiver of the same pattern being neatly encased in a pretty cabinet in the pearl boudoir above. And Mrs. Willoughby doubted, feared, suspected—nothing.
But all in vain did Helms record the telephoned messages which were trapped on the instrument which was his especial care. There was nothing to record of moment. A lull seemed to hover over every speculative interest of the convalescent woman.
The stillness of death now marked Mr. Harold Vreeland’s “business department” at the Elmleaf. The illness of Mary Kelly had cut off all special communication with Mrs. Willoughby at the Circassia, and he had been forced to give Miss Romaine Garland a furlough “under full pay” until Mrs. Willoughby’s trusted operator could resume her desk. The young girl shunned any tête-à-tête labors. It was in virtue of a warning from the acute Joanna Marble that Vreeland gravely bade his mysterious beauty rest herself and “await further orders.”
“She is of the finer clay,” warningly remarked Miss Joanna. “One toss of that proud head and she would be off like a startled fawn. You must trust to a woman—only a woman—to lead a woman on. Beware of rashness. You would lose her.”
There was an innocuous desuetude now clinging to all Vreeland’s crippled plans.
For, soberly attentive in his duty calls, he had left daily cards at the Circassia, supplemented with flowers whose dreaming beauty might have touched a heart less wrung than Elaine’s.
Admitted but once to her presence, he marveled at the serious change in her appearance.
After receiving her orders, he now knew that he was free for a month to follow on his social pleasures and to watch, down in Wall Street, the executive matters of the firm and note the gradual liquidation, dollar for dollar, of all proved claims against the defunct firm of Hathorn & Wolfe.
He recognized the cool-headed sifting of Mr. James Potter’s lawyers, under the mandates of that young Crœsus in Paris.
“A fair, square settlement, dollar for dollar,” was Potter’s openly avowed business plan.