“What the devil can the real motive of her quick return be?” angrily mused bridegroom Vreeland, as he called up again Senator Garston’s baffled fury on learning that for all his goading on, his detectives had failed to locate the missing Romaine Garland.
He led his beautiful bride back to her room, and then left her to the enjoyment of “Les Denis-Vierges,” while he eyed the fast-receding “Normandie.”
“Another big deal in ‘Sugar,’” he suddenly thought, and he felt himself perhaps hoodwinked by both Senators and the handsome woman who had so artfully led him on to his fate. “It may be that they all are fooling me; I may have been merely jockeyed away. Mrs. Willoughby can work the ‘off side’ of her deals alone from the ‘Elmleaf,’ and the regular transactions will go on as usual through our firm, really Alynton & Willoughby. Or, she may have picked up another protégé. God only knows what a woman may do.
“They all have their secrets, by Jove! Senator Garston or this cool devil, Hugh Conyers, may now turn up as the secret broker in my place.”
It suddenly occurred to him that the powerful Western millionaire might really be the favored lover, and Alynton, after all, only the dupe of a growing passion. “I am powerless to go further now,” he groaned, as he gazed at the rooms where his lovely and exacting bride was “squeezing the orange of life” to its last drop. He had found out, even now, that there were thorns upon his rosebud.
He was not yet entirely satisfied with the status of husband so recently assumed. Still affecting all the delicacy of the lover, he had, however, quite practically approached the subject of Katharine Norreys’
investments “in the hands of Uncle James.”
And he soon found out that the exquisite form of his dazzling blonde wife hid a resolute and undaunted spirit, an unruffled temper, and an easy, natural defiance of all marital control. “Where did she get her experience of life?” mused the startled bridegroom.
“You must go over all these tiresome matters, Harold, with Uncle James, on our return,” the overwearied, fashionable bride answered.
“I have never entered into any details with him, and I supposed, of course, that you and he had covered all this ground. I have only asked him for money as I needed it since my return, and he has always sent me his checks. It is for you, both business men, to regulate such matters.” And she cast her eyes down again on her entrancing book.