He plumed himself upon the approving glance of the beautiful brown eyes of the mistress of Lakemere as she had swept by on Fred Hathorn’s arm.
“She accepted my bow as an evident homage to her own queenly self,” mused Vreeland, who was no dabster at reading the ways of the mutable woman heart.
“Yes, she is my first play. I must burn my ships and now go boldly in for ‘High Life.’ I’ll risk it. Carlisle said: ‘There are twenty millions of people in Britain—mostly fools.’ Among the gilded fools of Gotham, some one easy mark must be waiting for me on general principles. I’ll take the chances and play the queen for my whole stack of chips.”
He wandered homeward, after narrowly inspecting the “Circassia,” and unconsciously attracting the attention of Daly, the Roundsman, the bravest and cheeriest member of the Tenderloin police.
Lights still gleamed from a splendid second-floor apartment above him, where a lovely woman, royal in her autumnal beauty, gazed out at the night.
Elaine Willoughby sighed as she turned away. “If I had told Hathorn all, he might have made me his wife. Alida—” Her face hardened as she choked down a sob. “My God! if I only knew! I must have Endicott renew his search.”
In some strange way, the handsome Western stranger returned to haunt her disturbed mind. “He looks like a man brave, gallant, and tender,” she sighed, as she forgot Hathorn, who, in his bachelor apartments was now musing upon the ways and means to hold Elaine Willoughby’s heart after he had wedded Miss Millions.
CHAPTER II.
THE DRIFT OF A DAY IN NEW YORK CITY.
Sparkling lances of golden morning sunbeams broke and shivered on the fretted golden roof of the Synagogue by Central Park’s eastern wall of living green.