On this sharp evening of early October, Senator-elect James Garston sat alone, moodily gazing into the cheerful wood fire in his sumptuous room at the Plaza. He watched the bright blaze for an hour, until the hickory billets had turned into white ashes, flaking the tiles at his feet.
On the table at his side lay an unfinished letter, and by the dying embers the man who had the world at his feet groaned. “Ashes of life! The ashes of a dead past.”
For, by the side of his last passionate appeal lay one or two tattered letters traced in a girlish hand.
Garston walked the floor with a strong, resounding tread, as he went over every detail of the veiled duel of the last months.
In the glass at either end of the room he saw his own strong, resolute face, the silvered temples framed in iron-gray hair, his brow furrowed with the lines of care which neither his honors nor his millions could efface.
On the table lay his watch, pocketbook and revolver. He paused, and picked up the heavy Smith & Wesson aimlessly. The man who had faced death in a hundred forms bitterly smiled as the trigger yielded to his practiced finger. There, he held ready fate in his hand!
“Here is either vengeance or release,” he gloomily muttered. “If we were to go together.”
And then his face softened. “Not yet! Not yet!” he murmured. “I shall live to look upon my child’s face.”
And so, he had honestly cast up the accounts of his life, not sparing himself. He knew that Elaine Willoughby was now surrounded by an alert body-guard of detectives; that her volunteer guardians were with her daily. Either Judge Endicott, his nephew or the grave-faced Hugh Conyers was always an inmate of Lakemere on every visit she made to that lonely spot, and his own detectives had warned him that a special policeman was also an inmate of her household, while Roundsman Dan Daly was a grand outside guard. He dared not approach her. Could he lure her to his side?
Ignorant of his wife’s secret warfare with Harold Vreeland, Senator Garston saw in all these precautions only the confirmation of her stern sentence of banishment from her presence.