In ten minutes, Justine Duprez listened to the quick galloping of a horse, whirling a coupé away at a breakneck speed. There was help sent for. Was it to be the police? She raged in her heart, for there was no indication of her angry mistress’ intentions.
“Not a word can I send off to warn Vreeland. It is every one for himself now. And she dare not arrest me, for all her quiet suspicions. The other women were in charge. And Vreeland must protect me now.” Justine felt reasonably safe.
The woman dreamed uneasy dreams, however, that night, for she had realized in the past days, to her astonishment, that she had been skillfully kept chained to her mistress’ side. She knew nothing of the one darling hope of Elaine Willoughby’s heart, to hide Miss Romaine Garland forever from the gleam of the pitiless eyes of the passion-maddened husband of her youth. And the caution of the secret council of friends had held her as a hostage indoors.
But Dr. Hugo Alberg was absolutely in the dark when he reached Lakemere by the earliest morning train. He marveled at the absence of Justine, when he awaited the summons of his supposed patient. The woman, secretly frightened more every moment at her long isolation from her only protector, was on duty, charged with carefully examining every article of her mistress’ wardrobe, and searching all the rooms where the invalid had been despoiled by parties unknown. She became bolder, for as yet, they had not dared to arrest her.
Through the opened doors of the anteroom, Justine Duprez could see the flushed face of the greedy German doctor as he conversed in a low tone with the woman whose every faculty was now on the alert. It was an hour of drawn out agony to her before the doctor hastened away, and from her window, Justine could see him being rapidly driven back to the station. And still her mistress was sternly silent.
That evening the household at Lakemere was reinforced by a detective in plain clothes, who publicly assembled every inmate of the mansion house and questioned them all, for some hours, upon every movement of the two nurses who had been in charge of their mistress. A shadow of suspicion brooded over the whole ménage
now. Justine Duprez was now conscious of a burning gnawing at her heart.
For, all day the pale-faced cripple, Mary Kelly, had been working with flying fingers at the side of Mrs. Willoughby, and the rattle of the key and the clang of the telephone bell was unceasing. The Frenchwoman’s nerves were shaken with the suspense.
“Vreeland is powerless here,” mused the frightened Frenchwoman. “He forgot in his haste to tap the wires from Lakemere to the old Judge’s office, and so, all harm can be done to us now. We are only digging in the dark. We have no defense whatever. We are cut off from each other. This house is really a prison for me now.”
The easy swing of Justine’s debonnair insolence would have moderated had she known that a detective promptly met Doctor Hugo Alberg at the Forty-second Street Station; that Mary Kelly’s schoolboy brother had orders not to lose sight of Vreeland in his daily wanderings, until relieved by the night detective; that the “Circassia,” too, was being watched night and day, and that even Senator James Garston was now provided with an invisible escort. For, Elaine Willoughby was fighting for life and love now, to the death.