There was but one occupant, however, for Madame Raffoni had silently disappeared before the diva, heavily veiled, entered the vehicle.
Clayton wondered at the protracted absence of his office boy, ignorant that the young double spy was standing before the Restaurant Bavaria watching Leah Einstein's furtive disappearance.
And neither the lad, astounded as his mother's unaccustomed finery, nor the love-blinded Randall Clayton ever knew that "Madame Raffoni" hastened to Magdal's Pharmacy to whisper to Mr. Fritz Braun tidings which brought a surging swell of triumph into that arch plotter's heart.
"Leah! You are a wonder, after all," was the comment of her old lover. "Keep this whole matter quiet. Hoodwink them all! And that pair of diamond ear-rings you dreamed of may fall your way at last!" The poor cast-off woman swore a blind obedience to her lover once, her tyrant still.
The adroit Timmins laughed in his heart when his employer, deliberately closing his cabinet, left the shop an hour earlier than usual on this particularly auspicious afternoon.
Fritz Braun's eyes gleamed viciously behind the blue glass screens as he sedately boarded his car. "Things are coming my way at last," he said. "I must not hurry, I must make no mistake, and I must let that Magyar devil fancy that she is playing this game herself, for one false step would ruin all." And he vowed to deceive the daring woman whom he feared to curb. "She shall work my will and not know the finale in the third act."
The office doors of the Western Trading Company closing, one by one, with a resounding clang, awoke Randall Clayton from day dreams which he dared not break off.
The office boy had not returned when Clayton, now on guard against every one in the employ of the Western robber baron, went out into the crowds pressing homewards.
He had given up, in a mad impulse, the whole faith of his unspent life to the woman who had whispered, "Go now, that we may meet again."
The thrilling accents of her voice, sweet and low, seemed to vibrate in his soul, and so, hugging his darling secret to his heart, he vowed to baffle Worthington's spies. "For her," he murmured, "I will outwit them all."