Men knew her only as the childless widowed chatelaine of Lakemere, the inheritor of a vast fortune hazily dating from Colorado.
A few cold words from that oracle, Judge Hiram Endicott, had dispelled any doubts as to the authenticity of the late Wharton Willoughby.
The checks of the woman whom all had failed to win were considered among the cognoscenti as gilt-edged as Treasury Certificates.
The grave glances of her sole attorney and trustee were also a no thoroughfare to prying gossipers, and it was only by a long series of stealthy financial sleuth work that the financial world discovered both “sugar” and “oil” to be as granite buttresses to the unshaken pyramid of her solid wealth. On the Street she was a whirlwind operator—with “inside tips!”
As the brougham swung along through Pine Street, Mrs. Willoughby caught a single glimpse of Fred Hathorn, eager-eyed, and hurrying to the Stock Exchange.
The man of thirty-five had risen to be a clubman—a yachtsman of renown—a man of settled fortune—and a social lion, too, in the five years since she had opened the gates of her heart to admit the handsome struggling youth, then paddling feebly in Wall Street’s foaming breakers.
She leaned back with a sigh. Hathorn’s sudden apparition had opened her eyes to the reason of her dull hatred of the millionaire fiancée
.
“He is the reason why I hate that girl,” she murmured, with misty lashes, and an old saw came back to her.
“It is hard to look out on a lover’s happiness through another man’s eyes!”