“Good God! We are ruined!” cried Vreeland.
“For all your fortune was in his hands. You have not a scrap of paper to show for it.”
“What do I care for the money!” she sobbed. “I am alone in the world now.”
CHAPTER XV.
IN THE DARK WATERS.
Senator David Alynton’s first duty on reaching the Hotel Belgravia was to hold a private conference with the confidential friend in whose rooms the Senator-elect had so strangely died. The body of the dead millionaire had been removed at once to his own personal apartments at the Hotel Plaza, where the travelers found assembled Garston’s lawyer, his physician, with his body servant. The private secretary was in charge, under the superintendence of a cool representative of the International Trust Company.
It touched Alynton to the heart, this lonely death chamber; for it seemed that “there was no one left to mourn for Logan.”
It is true that Mrs. Katharine Vreeland, in deepest black, was kneeling silently there at the foot of the coffin, ostentatiously supported by Mrs. Volney McMorris, whose social splendors were judiciously darkened for the time being by bits of crepe, like the veiling of the “bright work” on a fire engine at an old Volunteer Department funeral.
“Are there no near family relatives?” asked Alynton, in a muffled voice, as he gazed upon the majestic frame of the man who had fought himself up from disgrace to the Tantalus cup of triumph. It seemed a dreary, a lonely, an unwept taking-off!
“It seems not,” guardedly answered the Trust Company’s factotum. “We have his will in charge. The young lady kneeling there will be a large beneficiary, and besides her, there is only one other legatee, who it seems is a ward of Mrs. Elaine Willoughby, the great woman stock operator.”