“I am all alone in the world. Your veiled influence is making cold-hearted New York smile as a blossoming paradise for me. No; do not deny it. You are the very loveliest Queen of Friendship.” The beautiful brown eyes dropped before his eager gaze. She was a woman still.
Elaine Willoughby marked him as he went away with a growing interest. “Graceful, grateful, manly, and sincere!” was her verdict, easily reached, but one, however, not so enthusiastically adopted by either Judge Hiram Endicott or the Conyers couple, whom the Lady of Lakemere had captured for a visit before sending them away to the delightful summer exile of her Adirondack cottage.
“I don’t know what that fellow is after, Hugh?” growled the old Judge one day, as they were returning to town together; “but, he looks to me like a fellow who would finally get it.”
Conyers uneasily said: “He is the ‘head panjandrum’ of this Hathorn wedding—old college chum and all that.”
“Arcades ambo!” shortly said the silver-haired lawyer. “Mrs. Willoughby has a foolish fondness for picking up these Admirable Crichtons, and then forcing them along the road to fortune. It is only a generous woman’s weakness, a sort of self-flattery.”
“Vreeland is immensely rich—a man of leisure. Has jumped into one or two of the best clubs by mysterious backing, and seems to be all right,” slowly answered Hugh, mentally contrasting his own plain tweeds with Vreeland’s raiment of great price.
“I don’t believe a word of it,” sharply said Endicott. “Oblige me and just keep an eye on him—about her, I mean,” and the journalist was fain to give the required promise.
Their hands met in a silent pledge of loyalty to the lonely-hearted mistress of Lakemere.
The elder man alone knew the silent sorrows of her anxious soul. He alone knew of the quest of long years—a labor of love, so far fruitless.
The younger guarded his own heart secret in his honest breast, and yet, while hiding it from the world, he wondered why some man worthy of her royal nature had not taken her to wife.