It was midnight when the two men separated, after drinking a bottle of “Pommery” to the “ensuing happiness.” Garston’s eyes were at last gleaming with a triumphant joy. His quick wit suggested the way out.
“You are to stay quietly on in the enemy’s camp. I will let her think herself unpursued. Her desire to hoodwink you is our only salvation; and now I will prepare Katharine for your visit. Shake hands! Here’s to your married happiness. You are getting a pearl of a woman—a woman fit to be a queen.”
“I have made my fortune,” mused Vreeland, as he wandered back to the “Elmleaf.” “They are both of them in my power, Garston and Elaine. He shall never know that Elaine only found the girl by chance. I will play them off the one against the other.”
But, in the silence of his room that night the wild words of Alida Hathorn came back to him. Her parting curse, “I leave it to the future to punish you!” “I don’t see where the game can break against me,” he reflected, “I hold four aces!” And so he slept reassured.
He had read in the evening paper the announcement of the forthcoming engagement of the “well-known club man and millionaire, Mr. James Potter, to the charming widow of the late Frederick Hathorn.” “Newspaper enterprise!” sneered Vreeland. “Well, marriage seals her lips like many another sister who has wandered a few steps from the path. I am safe now.”
So rapid was the march of Senator Garston’s executive energy that a week later, under the caption of “Prospective Wedding in High Life,” Vreeland read the prophetic intimation of his own union with “the brilliant Western heiress, Miss Katharine VanDyke Norreys.”
“It is too late to recoil now,” he mused, “for this engagement will be telegraphed by Conyers over to my ‘financial backer.’”
The barriers were down, and nightly, under the guise of the usual preparations, Vreeland and Garston conspired against the woman whose heart was burning with all a mother’s still unsatisfied love. The Senator-elect was using all the mighty resources of his wit, fortune and hardihood to trap the travelers and to circumvent the wife who had defied him. And he wrought in a stern silence.
There was a little scene with Justine Duprez which was not down on the bills.
And of that scene, roundsman Daly was at once made aware by the reports of his woman spy, now the intimate friend of Justine’s old garde-chambre.