“Certainly, Justine,” was her mistress’ reply. “But always with Miss Kelly, as she may need you to help her at any moment. I leave her as my representative.”
The ashen pallor of fear tinged Justine Duprez’s cheeks, as she bowed in silence. “They know all, and I—I—must hold Vreeland now, between myself and the prison door.” Her mistress’ easy politeness gave no ground for mutiny or quarrel.
The frightened maid knew not whither her mistress had departed when the “Circassia” was deserted that evening by both the new body servants and the Lady of Lakemere. Their use as a bodyguard was all too evident.
But the resolute, pale-faced stenographer was on duty there and ready to enter upon her new kingdom. There was but one forlorn hope left to Justine—a hurried visit to August Helms, and to send the janitor down to the Elmleaf with a message to Harold Vreeland. She had not left the building, and her little absence was unnoted.
“Tell him that I must see him at once on a matter of life and death, and that he must come to your rooms and wait there to meet me. It is the only way, and he must come without a moment’s delay, for all our sakes! Go!”
The stolid German janitor smiled over the ten-dollar bill, which he pocketed, and after an hour’s waiting at the Elmleaf, learned from the parchment-faced Bagley that Mr. Harold Vreeland was dining at the Savoy with Senator Garston and Miss Norreys. A grand, private “swell function,” and so, likely to be a late one.
“I’ll give him your message,” obligingly said Mr. Vreeland’s man. “I ’ave always to wait up for him, you know. He has to be undressed by me. So, I am sure to see him.”
Helms was anxious to get away and sample the good “Münchner Leist-brau” in his brother-in-law’s saloon near by, and so he yielded up his story with a sly wink. “Fine girl, that Justine. They are all the same—these pretty French maids.”
When he lumbered away, he did not realize that Judge Hiram Endicott had received the message before the triumphant Harold Vreeland had returned, flushed with both love and wine. The blundering janitor had played into the enemy’s hands, and Bagley had easily earned a heavy reward.
Before Vreeland sat in hiding the next morning, awaiting Justine in Helms’ rooms at the “Circassia,” Hugh Conyers handed a cipher dispatch to Mrs. Elaine Willoughby at Washington, on her way to Asheville, in the far North Carolinian