And, still, a growing excitement filled the aspiring young banker’s veins.
While he had struggled on the floor of the Exchange, he was suddenly smitten with a fear that his patroness had abruptly abandoned him.
He sent a confidential lad over to watch Judge Endicott’s office, and he was soon rewarded with the reliable news that the serene goddess of Pactolus had calmly driven away after an hour’s stay at her trustee’s office.
“What is she up to?” he fretted. “I’ll find out if she really goes home!” he then decided, with a growing uneasiness, as he marked the surging tide of Sugar speculation.
He was fortunate enough to attract the personal attention of Harold Vreeland, of Montana, for that new member of the jeunesse dorée
was held socially in eclipse, until Bell’s minions should purvey the “robes of price” suited to the swelling port assumed by the bold social gambler.
The hearty assent of the fancied dupe to the evening call, enabled Hathorn to call his patroness by the private wire at the Circassia.
“By Jove! She is lucky to be out of this flurry!” he decided, when Mrs. Willoughby’s voice closed the telephonic interview without even a passing reference to “the market.” “She did go home after all!”
And, so lulled to security, he remembered all the vastness of her varied moneyed interests. He knew only the magnitude of her transactions in the past.
The hidden reasons of her Napoleonic moves he had never penetrated, and he had vainly shadowed her visits to Washington and sifted the guests at her summer palace. But now, his future control was endangered.