Their hands met in a silent pledge of a friendship which shone in Elaine Willoughby’s misty eyes. “How can I thank you?” she began; but gravely Harold Vreeland addressed her to her growing astonishment.
“Wait!” he said, with a seeming reluctance. “I never would have shown you that letter but to save your own noble soul from the humiliation of stooping to a conference with a man who would so meanly trade upon your past bounty and try to trap you, through me. Your confidence has brought this out. But, you must hear all. I claim no credit for declining to be the man to hoodwink you. ‘The pleasant days of Aranjuez’ are waning fast. I am soon going to leave New York and go back to the great West.”
Vreeland noted the quick, convulsive start, and his heart rejoiced as she grasped his hands, whispering: “Never! My one faithful knight shall stay here near me to battle in my defense, ‘even if I am old enough to be Alida Hathorn’s mother.’ Tell me all. It is my right now to know all your plans.”
The handsome adventurer raised his grave face to her own. “I will, if you will promise me to ignore these two people—the hollow-hearted man who would use me to entrap you, and that saucy girl, a spoiled child from her cradle. Hathorn carries his own future punishment around with him in that crisp bundle of dimity.”
The unspoken pledge of her eyes told him that his coup had succeeded. “By Jove!” he mused, “she is only a woman, like the rest. The taunt as to her age has cut her deeper than this fellow’s rank ingratitude.”
He gazed upon her Indian summer beauty, and his eyes strayed away to the pillared glories of the matchless country mansion. “She’s worth the risk—with Lakemere,” he reflected. “I’ll try it!” He yielded and spoke, and she listened with tender eyes.
And the shadows deepened around them, as the young schemer told a plaintive story of emotional lying embroidery to the woman whose agitated heart was swept with a storm of revengeful feeling.
A passionate desire to punish the younger woman whose husband had used the mean taunt of her sunset years to quiet the jealous little spitfire heiress.
“I did not come to New York City under false pretenses,” began Vreeland, “but, Hathorn has taken me wrongly to be a rich man. I am only a poor man to-day, and a weary and a lonely life lies before me.”
“I could not muster the hundred thousand dollars needed to go into their firm, for I have made myself poor in the discharge of a sacred duty.”