“Once safe in Paris, Justine can easily hide me there. I can easily extort a fortune from Mrs. Willoughby and her rich associates. Justine can marry and have her petit hôtel. The document will be a wellspring of flowing golden treasure.”
And so in his last hours of life, the woman whom he would once have sacrificed became his only hope, and to draw her to his presence at their only safe trysting place he had gone to the “Circassia” for the last time. But she could not see his furtive signals, his hovering around. She herself was under lock and key now!
The artful schemer proved in death the truth of Mr. James Potter’s favorite adage, for his punishment “came around, like everything else, to the man who waited,” and he only waited in vain, for Justine Duprez’s footfall. But, grim Death found him out red-handed in his miserable treachery.
Judge Endicott was closeted with Mrs. Willoughby as Roundsman Dan Daly sprang into the room and led the trembling woman to a corner.
When they were alone, Daly whispered:
“Just step into your own room and see if this is all right.
“For God’s sake, never tell a human soul how you got it back. I have gone beyond my duty to get this into your hands. I would be cast off the force, punished and disgraced.”
The old lawyer heard Elaine Willoughby’s cry of affright when Daly told her that Vreeland lay dead by his own hand in the squalid trysting place of sin.
Hugh Conyers, with a fine prescience of some coming tragedy, had held the boy messenger under his own eye in the rooms where he sat guarding Justine until her partner in crime should have been seized.
“Let no one know, not even him!” begged Daly. “Let the world always think it to have been a suicide induced by drink and overspeculation. I can cover it all up.