“She helped Alida Hathorn on to the very verge of ruin,” he gloomily recalled.
“There might have been a marriage between myself and Elaine but for her vicious intermeddling.
“She took that Isle of Wight story in commission and spread it all over New York, while working both sides for coin—a woman Judas!”
While he returned the salutations of Messrs. Merriman, Wiltshire and Rutherstone on the social parade, he was vaguely reflecting on the uselessness of his crime as regarded the stealing of the hidden paper and the tapping of the private wires, as well as the mail frauds.
It now followed him like his own shadow, and the paper was a source of countless nightmares. If it were only safe!
“All that is useless now,” he growled. And he suddenly saw that he was left in the power of Doctor Hugo Alberg, of Justine and of August Helms, the janitor.
“There will be no speculation in ‘Sugar’ for months; the market is dead, pending the reorganization and New Jersey reincorporation.
“My strange employer is away. She will not be here for months; and she has also taken alarm at the presence of Garston.
“The whole lot of them will probably operate in a blind pool now. There will be nothing for me to gain, and everything to lose in running any further risks.”
He saw with concern that Alberg greatly missed his wealthy and generous patient, and a few significant hints had proved to him that the German physician was now “money hungry.”