“Remember, you need not answer, if you don’t care to; but you must give me the right to feel that you are a gentleman. My husband’s enemies may or may not be mine!” She burned a Parthian glance into his trembling heart.
“Why did you conceal from him that you were going into banking, and let him go on and parade you as his best friend, and all that?” she curtly demanded.
“Mrs. Hathorn,” earnestly pleaded the accomplished liar, “another man had my promise of partnership long before I left Montana. He was already making arrangements as to offices and several confidential matters on which our firm’s future depended.
“I was only asked to give your husband an answer on October 1st.
“And I did give one early enough—a friendly declination—which your husband made me repeat too forcibly. You should not blame me for our little estrangement.”
“And you did not scheme to supplant him with—with—”
“One word, Madame,” meaningly said Vreeland. “I have opened my heart to you. Noblesse oblige! Your question was one I could honorably answer, just as I could not honorably forewarn men whom fate had made our business rivals.
“Remember, all’s fair in love, stocks, and war. And it’s every man for himself in New York.”
“And every woman, too,” added Mrs. Alida, with a little snaky smile.
“I always liked you,” she hesitatingly said, and then, her eyes dropped before the ardent and merciless gaze of a man who now saw “a new way to pay old debts.”