He well knew that the artful protégé had only used the generous woman’s volunteered bounty of the past—“as means to an end.”
“Elaine has simply coined her golden heart for that smart cad!” he sighed, as he grasped a blunted spear of a pencil to dash off an editorial upon “German Influence in the South Seas.”
In her guarded downtown office, Mrs. Elaine Willoughby resolutely put aside the one subject now nearest her heart, to summon, by signal, the fortunate man who was fast slipping out of her life.
The startled Queen of the Street gave but ten minutes’ time to the consideration of the sudden change in the affairs of a giant syndicate which used two hundred millions of dollars in swaying the world of commercial slaves at its feet.
A warning word from Hiram Endicott’s nephew (his sole confidant) told her that her lawyer-trustee had just been summoned, privately, to meet the inscrutable Chief of the Syndicate.
With keen acumen, she reviewed the hostile probing of a mighty Senate, into the Sealed Book of the great Trust’s affairs.
From her own safe, she then extracted a memorandum book and grimly smiled, as she noted a date—May 17, 1884.
She quickly read over two cipher letters, dated “Arlington Hotel, Washington, D.C.,” which had been silently handed her by Endicott’s only relative, and murmured, “Can it be that the Standard Oil people are going to quietly buy in and wager their vast fortunes on the double event?
“Hiram will know—and—what he knows we will keep to ourselves!”
A sense of absolute safety possessed her when she reflected that the sole depositary of her life secrets—the one man au courant with her giant speculations was a childless widower and had passed the age when passions’ fires glow—and was, moreover, rich beyond all need of future acquisition.