“Well,” good-humoredly answered Vreeland, “between you and me we will manage to guard her and take care of her property, if she will only let us.”
The miserly German’s eyes gleamed as they drank to their private pact.
“The great thing is to keep every one else away from her,” whispered Alberg. “I of course watch her professionally. You must keep off all those society sharks like that upstart Hathorn.”
“Trust to me. I know my business,” laughed Vreeland.
When Vreeland left Lakemere on the last day of the old year, his only reminder was the whispered word, “Remember!”
“I will wait at the Waldorf,” he answered, with a last meaning gleam in his eyes.
Standing now on an almost secure pedestal, Vreeland never dared to dream of the sentimental approach upon the woman who was now the sole arbiter of his destiny.
“That would be the clumsiest mistake of all,” he decided. “Only—when she comes into the net—I will tighten it.”
He well knew that the bachelor apartment was to be the scene of some veiled financial strategy and not a rosy Paphian bower.
Mean and low at heart as he was, he knew that her soul towered above all low deceit, as the rosy Jungfrau lifts its unsullied peaks to the blue skies.