In the gilded throng at Lakemere, the proprietary endearments of Frederick Hathorn had galled her stormy soul. She knew not that the parvenu broker was only publicly sealing, beyond a doubt, the projected union which would make him the equal in capitalistic reserve of that easy-going Son of Fortune, Potter, to whom all things came around—even Miss Dickie Doubleday’s bills.
A ray of light lit up her darkened heart.
“Alida is innocent of wrecking my happiness. She could know nothing. For I have been silent! And if I held the ladder, can I blame him for climbing? He needs me no longer.
“I have been only a means to an end. Alida will be the last. And then, Frederick Hathorn, Esquire, is safely in the swim!”
A sudden conviction of the uselessness of her affectation of a semi-maternal interest in the fortunes of the hardened man of thirty-five told her that she had left all the doors open to him.
For there was that in her own life, dating back to her girlhood, which she had never even revealed to her half-lover protégé.
With her rich womanly nature sorely shaken, her tender dark eyes drooping, she now owned to the hope, now fled forever, that Hathorn would light the beacon of love in her lonely heart. “I have not trusted him,” she murmured. “He owes me nothing, nothing but gratitude.”
Too late, she saw that mere gratitude does not kindle into love, and a sense of her own lack of frankness sealed her accusing lips.
“I can not blame Hathorn!” she murmured. “It is my own fault. I told him the truth, but—not the whole truth!”
Still, she suffered from the shattering of flattering hopes long secretly cherished, and saw now the marriage of her financial éleve as a future bar to the confidential relations which had linked him to her fortunes with golden chains.