“Once for all, let us drop Mrs. Willoughby. I will not, in any way, take sides in this unfortunate affair, save to silently cleave to the Lady of Lakemere, through good and evil report.
“If you dare not face her, if you have abandoned her to the mercies of the pack of be-diamonded old ghouls who are slandering her, you know, of course, that you will close the door of your house to every friend of hers.” The bridegroom was cornered—and his heart was filled with a sullen despair.
Hathorn strode up and down the room in a white rage. He paused, at last, before Vreeland, and then, in a choking voice, said: “I must ask you to return my last confidential letter.”
Vreeland calmly moved toward the door. “I am a free man—am I not?” he quietly said. “I believe a letter is the property of the party to whom addressed when regularly delivered through the mail. When you divide the clans of society you will find me—on the other side.
“And, as my time is of value, you will now excuse me. Don’t force me to tell Potter, whom I respect, that you only wanted to use me as a stool pigeon to entrap the woman who has made you what you are—a solid man—in Wall Street!”
With a mad impulse, Hathorn sprang to the door.
“No! by Jove! No row here!” he muttered, and when he sauntered downstairs with an assumed carelessness, his guest had departed.
There was a “lively interlude in married life” transacted late that evening “behind closed doors,” at the Buckingham, in which Mr. Frederick Hathorn, for the second time that evening, suffered a sore defeat, and “went below” to seek the consolation of Otard-Dupuy & Co.’s very ripe old pale cognac.
That bright-eyed falcon, Alida Hathorn, then and there ran up the red flag of “War to the Knife”—and “No Surrender!”
But the jubilant Harold Vreeland slept not till he had personally, at Broadway and Twenty-third Street, sent off an urgent dispatch to Lakemere. “I think that reads strongly enough,” chuckled Vreeland, as he gazed on the words.