“I wish you to go away at once on your wedding tour, and then to keep Mrs. Willoughby in sight—within touch. I only want to meet the mother and daughter face to face—only once. I will have my innings then, and finish the whole matter in short order.” His face was merciless now.
“Now, you will be no object of suspicion on your wedding tour; such a happy voyage always explains itself,” he sardonically smiled. “The moment that I am cabled for, I shall depart incognito. My work will be quickly done when I find this sly woman and her child together. The whole world is not wide enough to hide that child from me.” And Vreeland drifted daily under Garston’s strong control; he was floating with the tide, drunken with all his successes.
The days drifted along in all the preoccupation of daily business and the growing bustle of the impending wedding.
Harold Vreeland was most agreeably surprised in the later days of May by a cordial letter from Mrs. Willoughby, posted at Port Said. Her congratulations upon his impending marriage were coupled with her carte blanche as to leave of absence from the firm, and the significant direction to leave Bagley in charge at the Elmleaf.
“We shall have business uses for the apartment during the winter, and Miss Kelly will give Bagley all his orders and attend to the accounts. I have directed Judge Endicott to present in my name to your wife a proper reminder of the esteem which I have for her.”
The notification three days before the wedding, through Noel Endicott, that Mrs. Willoughby had placed a year’s salary at his personal disposal on the books of the firm, as an extra bonus, carried away the last vestige of Vreeland’s haunting fears.
Nothing remained of the awkward episode of the inquiry as to the stolen document, and Vreeland had already settled with Doctor Alberg, and Helms with an affected liberality, for his absence.
Now socially entirely in the hands of Messrs. Wiltshire, Merriman and Rutherstone, his three groomsmen, and having seen the resplendent Mrs. Volney McMorris rally many beautiful Ishmaelites, married and single, around his bride, Vreeland was moved forward to the altar on the golden flood of Senator Garston’s splendidly liberal preliminary entertaining.
The Western millionaire was touching up every cloud hanging over Katharine VanDyke Norreys’
social haziness with a golden lining.