The schemer darted away with a sudden impulse.
Ten minutes later he sat with Justine Duprez, in a hidden little nest of her own in South Fifth Avenue. It had flashed over his mind that Mlle. Justine’s Sunday off, just suited his purpose.
It was not the first time that he had communed with her there, in a room once sacred to Frederick Hathorn’s private information bureau.
The startled maid had barely time to meet her generous new admirer when he questioned her sharply upon the subject of Doctor Alberg’s recent revelations.
And, to his annoyance, he for the first time found the Parisian woman to be obdurate. She had been curtly abandoned by Hathorn, who had forgotten to hand over her final payment in all the hurried glories of the VanSittart wedding.
She alone knew that the vain fool had stupidly imagined that Elaine Willoughby only urged on his marriage in order to be able later to cloak an intimacy which would have later made Justine’s fortune.
And now, she would not be balked out of the harvest of fortune. For an hour, the ardent Vreeland pleaded with the artful woman. Her bold eyes, dulled with the bistre stains, gleamed with triumph as he pleaded with her.
The elegant young man alternately flattered and caressed the brown-faced intrigante, whose coarse beauty had long been the toast of the cabaret which she yearned to possess in Paris.
Her voluptuous bosom and heavy haunches were the antipodes of Vreeland’s beauty ideal, and yet, he knelt to flatter and to sue. For she alone could spy upon the most sacred privacy of the woman he had sworn to rule.
Justine eyed him keenly, and spoke at last. “Give me a thousand dollars and promise that you will give me a free hand if you marry Madame,” she said, as she yielded to his self-abusing pleadings.