“Either Hathorn has surprised the secret of her early life and spirited away her child, hoping to have drawn her down to his will, or—can it be that she means to sell out the sugar syndicate?”
He gazed reflectively at the winter landscape flying by, as he pondered over the first. “No!” was his correct deduction. “Hathorn is powerless. He would surely have held on to her business, by fear or force, and gained the inside track in the great gamble, Sugar.
“He would have bent her to his will, and carried on the old hideous gilded sin—to make his light o’ love his young wife’s best friend.
“That’s quite fin de siècle in New York, they tell me.
“His crime was only the bull-headed folly of preferring another and a younger woman to the one woman whom he could have gratefully and logically married.
“There is a man’s fatuous vanity to look for her support in chasing down a younger and prettier rival under her very eyes. And yet, she hastened on the marriage. By Jove! she did. It’s a mystery to me!”
The puzzled schemer never knew of the real foundation of his own blossoming fortunes.
The lightning flashes of Elaine Willoughby’s mad anger came when Judge Endicott had found out that Frederick Hathorn was secretly shadowing his loving and trusting employer and tracing back her past life. Then, Elaine Willoughby became a wolf on the trail.
All of social life is but a hoodman blind game. The stern old lawyer was only carrying out a secret quest, and he could not divine that Hathorn’s real object was to trace down to a direct connection Elaine Willoughby’s secret alliance with the heads of the great Sugar Trust. It was but a mean money greed, after all.
Keenly alive to every pointer of the Street, Hathorn had not learned, for all his five years of florid devotion, that his lovely patroness had sealed that one treasured secret in her soul. And, meanly, he had tried to dig under her mines. But it was the thirst for gold alone that fired his veins.