He knew, too, what cold resentment burned in his old chum’s heart. He had secretly followed (through his agents) some of these skirmishers directly back to Hathorn, Wolfe & Co.’s office. And the cards were played both from the top and the bottom of the pack.
Once he had himself caught Hathorn’s eyes following him with all the wolfish glare of a murderous heart.
There were, besides, rumors of quarrels in the opposing firm and the early retirement of the returning Potter.
And other sly traps were laid for him with silky scoundrelism. He was well aware that the defiant Alida Hathorn had openly expressed her utter disbelief in the existence of the late Wharton Willoughby. Even the prehensile Mrs. Volney McMorris had waylaid him to confess that she had never observed, in either of Mrs. Willoughby’s establishments, any mortuary bust, portrait, or even an humble photograph of the permanently eclipsed man who had given his name to the Queen of the Street. These things were food for uneasy thoughts harassing to the young schemer.
And this respectable social scavenger had faltered out some indirect javelin thrusts evidently pointed by Hathorn’s willfully reckless wife.
There were at least two men in Elaine Willoughby’s entourage who, for gain and a passion under the rose, might be the source of all that quietly-sustained splendor which had so enraged the young married heiress.
Mr. Harold Vreeland was on guard. He only fixed his fine eyes upon Mrs. McMorris in a pained surprise when that bustling dame hinted that he could easily drag forth the desired information.
“I have always had a penchant, my dear Madame, for minding my own business,” was his most prudent rejoinder.
So, entrenching himself in the towers of silence, he was safe, but Vreeland also left a bitter enemy behind, on the pleasant afternoon when he wondered why Messrs. Merriman, Wiltshire, and Rutherstone had bidden him “to be one of a little party of four” at the Old York Club. It was an able effort at scientific pumping.
He had never entered that gilded fortress of the jeunesse dorée