“Then you have no permanent bank account of your own?” moodily demanded Vreeland.
“Why should I have one?” innocently replied Mrs. Katharine Vreeland, “when Uncle James has always paid the bills and furnished me all that I ask? I have never asked him for any formal accounting.” Harold Vreeland was secretly nettled at her easy carelessness.
“And if he were to die, if anything happened, you would then know nothing of your own affairs,” said the dissatisfied husband.
“No more than I know now of yours, my dear,” calmly answered Katharine, settling herself deeper in her cushions. “Uncle James simply told me that you were a very rich man, and of course, I took his word. I have not asked you to inventory your own possessions.”
She was turning an unusually interesting leaf as Vreeland walked out of the cabin in a suppressed rage.
“We are both at sea, it appears,” was his disquieting thought, and again the remembrances of that slender family tree of his lovely wife annoyed him. It seemed to begin and end in the graves of the dead parents, who were only gruesome shadows.
“I will go over this whole ugly matter with Garston at once, just as soon as I see him,” was Vreeland’s mental decision. “Katharine is either a child-wife of the Dora order, or else far deeper than the sea that we are skimming over now.”
It came to him cogently that he had taken her “on trust” largely, and that a current of life’s mysterious undertow had swept him along into Senator Garston’s power. There was no going back, however.
“It is too late to hesitate now,” he mused, as he uneasily gazed back toward America, well knowing that some giant game might be played in his absence.
In the deal there would be no cards for him, however the luck might turn. And there remained but one golden gleam in the gray clouds. He had that paper with which to dominate Mrs. Willoughby. But, it was a dangerous weapon; it might prove a boomerang.