“Mr. Jimmy” now seriously contemplated a two years’ visit to Europe on the return of the successfully married Hathorn. “The little rift within the lute” was widening. Miss Doubleday was as exacting as she was charming, and even “rosy fetters of ethereal lightness” were galling to the spoiled child of fortune. Potter had secretly purchased a Gazetteer and had made some furtive studies as to Askabad, Astrachan, Khiva, Timbuctoo, Khartoum, and several other places where his golden-haired tyrant could not follow him without due premonition. He contemplated a “change of base.”
“I hope you will come in with us, Vreeland,” cordially remarked Potter. “Hathorn tells me that you are well up in stocks and as quick as lightning. I wouldn’t mind helping you to an interest. I must escape this—this—”
The puzzled little millionaire paused, for the first word was a misfit, and he was a good devil at heart. He could not abuse the tantalizing Miss Dickie Doubleday.
With a fine discrimination, the rising social star was touched with one pang of regret at the little man’s agony, now impaled on the hook of Miss Dickie Doubleday’s angle. He visited that bright-eyed young Ithuriel, and soon effected a “modus vivendi” which enabled Potter to cruise around on his yacht for one month of blessed and unhoped for peace.
In several sittings upon the “Nixie,” Mr. Harold Vreeland relieved his grateful host of some fourteen thousand dollars, by the application of the neat little Western device known as “the traveling aces.”
But, James Potter, grateful to the core, and lulled by the insidious Pommery, never “caught on,” and cheerfully “cashed up” without a murmur.
From this victorious encounter, Mr. Harold Vreeland gaily returned to Lakemere, after a brief tour of inspection of the seaside resorts sacred to the gente fina. He found everything “grist to his mill.” The gates were widely ajar.
With the patient assiduity of a well-conceived purpose, he now began to make the most of this “one summer.”
He was well aware, from the reports of the complacent Justine, that the Conyers were both out of the way, and his heart bounded with delight as he realized that Elaine Willoughby gracefully called him to her side on those four days of the week when Hiram Endicott was not in commune with her, in the splendid gray stone mansion bowered in its nodding trees.
He always paid her the delicate compliment of an implicit obedience, and in all the days of absence found the way made smooth for him elsewhere.