On his homeward way, Vreeland studied the stars with an anxious brow.
“She shall not get away from me,” he swore. “I wonder if Mary Kelly and she are now only duplicate spies of the woman who once had a use for me, and now fears the poor tools she has used. Did I get at the whole Hathorn secret?
“That is forever sealed in poor Fred’s grave.”
He started as a brilliant golden star trailed over the inky blackness of the night.
“That’s bad luck,” he gloomily reflected, as he cursed the wary young girl’s divination of his clumsy social trick. “It was a wretched botch,” he said, as he angrily dismounted at his own door, and the failure over-shadowed his gloomy slumbers.
Three days later, when Harold Vreeland gazed across the dinner table at Senator James Garston’s immutable face, he wondered what future intrigues were hidden behind the mask of the strong man’s assumed carelessness. They were alone, hidden in a retired room of the Millionaires’ Club, and, as of old, Harold Vreeland, played his waiting game. The two men were fairly matched—past masters of deceit.
Greed, ambition, revenge, a desire to reach the gilded coterie of New York’s crème de la crème
, all these motives Vreeland suspected, but not that an old love, revived in a burning passion, a mad desire for repossession, thrilled the hardened heart of the man “who had once thrown a pearl away, richer than all his tribe.”
Vreeland was wary and yet uneasy. His heart’s desire, easily won wealth, now seemed to recede, like the pot of gold buried beneath the rainbow. He swore to make no mistake in the impending deal.
After a long mental debate, he had decided upon separate hiding places for the copy and the original of the one document, which, a two-edged scimetar, gave him a crushing control, he fondly fancied, over Alynton, Garston, and also the Lady of Lakemere.