“And only you shall know her secrets. I hate that Doctor!” she cried. “I can find out all you want to know, but, you must do as I wish.” Her velvet eyes gleamed in a fierce flame.
“Listen, Justine,” urged Vreeland. “To-morrow I will bring you a thousand dollars when I come to the Circassia. Tell me now what you can; I swear to make you rich if you will only stand by me. It is Sunday,” he added. “No banks are open to-day. This first hundred will not count.”
And he thrust a bill into her brown hand.
“I have watched for years to find the secret of her past life,” promptly said the sly Justine, drawing nearer to Vreeland. “I, too, thought of an affaire. It is not. But, a secret there is, and only one man knows—the old lawyer. I hid myself near them on his last visit, for they talked long, and Madame fell down fainting after he had gone away.
“Their talk was of the old times, and it is always so, when they come to that. But, this time I listened carefully while she moaned in her sorrow.”
“And she said?” anxiously cried Vreeland.
“‘My child! My child! Give me back my child!’ she cried. And so there is a child, and it is not of the Senator! Voilà
! They are stupidement placide toujours! Les affaires! Only—ze monnaie! She loves him not. And only the old man knows. You shall watch him and her.”
A sudden suspicion of a feminine double life brought a name to Vreeland’s lips.
“Hathorn!” he said, with a meaning look at his partner in an already vicious intrigue. For Justine Duprez knew him in all the pliant baseness of his real nature, and they had groveled toward each other from the very first.