Elaine Willoughby was sullen, but resolute, as she arranged the details of her morning interview by the Ariel magic of her private telephone.
The ceaseless activity of the Street compelled the veiled “queen” to have her own “intelligence department” adjoining her boudoir, a nook with its special wires leading to Hiram Endicott’s office and even to his sober Park Avenue home, and its talking wire also extended to the private office of Frederick Hathorn, Esq., of Hathorn and Potter, and another handy wire leading to the lair where the cashier of the Chemical Bank scanned the ebb and flow of Mrs. Elaine Willoughby’s fortune.
A stock ticker and dial telegraph, binding the central office of the Western Union to the Circassia, were always stumbling blocks to the insidious Justine, who earned a vicious golden wage in piping off every movement of the queen to the adroit Fred Hathorn.
On this particular morning, Hathorn was disturbed at heart as he answered Justine’s spying warning of Mrs. Willoughby’s early departure for her downtown coign of vantage—that room in Judge Endicott’s offices in the Hanover Bank building, which was terra incognita even to him. The corner of Pine and Nassau was an Ehrenbreitstein.
For Hathorn’s acutest schemes had never yet given him the open sesame to the room adjoining Hiram Endicott’s study bearing the simple inscription “Office Willoughby Estate.”
There, Madame Elaine was safe, even from him.
He grumbled: “I don’t half like the way Elaine eyed Alida VanSittart yesterday. There was a storm signal in my lady’s glances. If she should draw away her account—”
He shuddered, for he was well overdrawn in his personal relations with Mr. Jimmy Potter, who had just meekly slunk into his office, with quivering nerves and much pink-eyed indications of the aftermath of “a cosy little evening at Miss Dickie Doubleday’s.”
“I must keep her well in hand till I pull off the marriage. Sugar is on the jump, too. There’s a half million if I follow her sure lead.
“By God! I would give ten years of my life to know who posts her in that saccharine article of prime necessity. I will give her something to interest her. Yes; the very thing! I’ll run in Hod Vreeland there.