“Listen! All these merrymakers will go away with the old year. Judge Endicott brings me the firm’s settlement papers on New Years. I will then send for you and make you my secret representative in a momentous affair.
“To protect my interests you must at once leave the Waldorf.
“Trust to me!” she smiled. “I will have your bachelor apartments ready. And no one, not even Wyman, must ever learn of your ‘secret service.’ Silence and obedience, and your fortune is assured. You alone shall battle for me and drive this fool Hathorn forever from the Street.
“Go now! You will leave with the first departing guests, but await my telegram at the Waldorf to come to me here. And so, I have your plighted word. Never a whisper to a living soul. You are to be still only the office partner—to the world!”
Vreeland snatched her trembling hand and kissed it.
It was burning in fever.
But he sped away, and before the curtain rose to a chorus of happy laughter and shouts of delighted surprise, a glance in a corner of the hallway where Justine awaited him showed him a check for twenty-five thousand dollars as his Christmas gift. His patroness had handed him the precious envelope in silence.
In a low whisper he opened the gates of paradise to the French woman, who watched her lover with flaming eyes. “Five thousand dollars of this to you, if you find out for me the secret of that child.”
And he left her, panting with the thrill of a sated avarice.
“I will go through fire and water to serve you,” she faltered. “I will steal the secret from her midnight dreams.”