“It will there be safe from all American legal process, and the original is here where I can use it if needed, and as it is, it can never be traced to me.”
He carefully examined the exterior of the row of solid brick tenements. They were good for a life of fifty years.
As he walked away, when he had “finished his letters,” and left a last greeting for Justine, he stood upon the heights of an impregnable position.
“It was a stroke of genius, that last idea of mine!” he gaily cried, as his eye rested on an old woman who had just descended the stair. He knew not the burden of her eager soul. She carried his fate!
Once around the corner, that old woman scuttered away to find roundsman Dan Daly, for the peep-hole had covered a keenly-glittering eye, even after Justine had left her sighing lover to his “last bachelor letters.” And thus the hiding-place was known to more than one.
But Vreeland hastened away in a triumphant glow of satisfaction.
The splendors of the Grace Church wedding, the gilded festivity of the Waldorf wedding dinner, and all the countless preoccupations of the impending voyage busied Harold Vreeland’s excited mind for three days.
There were hundreds of valuable wedding presents to deposit in safety, for society had showered gifts upon the successful interloper with its hard-hearted, hollow flattery of success. It had been a “society event,” and his face, with that of the beautiful bride, had ornamented several “up-to-date” journals.
The flower-decked bridal staterooms of the “Campania” had received Vreeland’s party, and Messrs. Rutherstone, Merriman and Wiltshire were joining the bride and bridesmaids in the parting “loving cup,” the table was covered with journals filled with the usual “glowing accounts” and piled up high with congratulatory letters and telegrams, when “Uncle James”
drew the complacent bridegroom aside.