For the summer boats were already running, and, on the broad piazzas of the Oriental they could safely meet.
It was so easy for Madame Raffoni to pilot the incognito diva by the railway to the Manhattan Hotel. A double veil and a judiciously fringed sunshade would make Irma Gluyas impregnable to the flaneur.
"Alas! The days of Aranjuez are over," sighed Clayton, for this tryst of Thursday was to be followed by the election on Friday.
As yet Arthur Ferris had given no sign of his impending arrival. Some gloomy foreboding weighed down Randall Clayton's soul with a fear of coming disaster. He felt how powerless he was in the hands of the cruel conspirators who had robbed him of his fortune.
He never doubted that Senator Durham and the treacherous Ferris both possessed Hugh Worthington's dastardly secret, and that they all stood ready to crush him.
The innocent four-line advertisement of the annual election had been duly inserted in the obscure corners of certain fourth-class journals, "as required by law."
There was an oily grin upon Robert Wade's self-satisfied face, and, with no single word from Worthington or Ferris, Clayton felt the toils closing around him. He was left out of the game—a mere poor pawn.
It was on the night before his five-o'clock tryst at the Manhattan, when Clayton suddenly sprang from his chair. "By God! I have it!" he cried. "Old Wade has failed to trap me. Ferris, the smug scoundrel, will glide back here and try to steal into my intimacy. He can post his slyly posted spies. I cannot then keep him off. And he will reiterate Worthington's plans, cling to me, and run me to earth. He will take up his Judas trade, and either trap me or else, baffled, will telegraph Worthington and have me discharged. Why has he concealed this secret marriage? And, damnation! I cannot ever meet Jack Witherspoon in private without giving myself away. I must have some one meet Witherspoon at the steamer and arrange for one meeting out of town. He must go over to Philadelphia and await me. I can take an evening train over, and be back here, even if Ferris hangs on my track. I will go out alone, as if to the theater, and then turn up belated. Ferris must not know. It is for my life, for Irma, and for my fortune that I struggle now. My God! Whom can I trust now, and they have poisoned Alice's mind against me. I see their damned villainy. Poor Little Sister! Another man's wife now. She will never know."
In his lover's second sight Randall Clayton had really stumbled on the artful measure by which the old Croesus had deliberately shifted Alice Worthington's love for her old-time playmate.
Over his gold-bowed spectacles, Hugh Worthington, the "surviving partner," had sadly read aloud the details of Randall Clayton's "New York career." "Forget him, Alice," the old man sternly said. "He has fallen on evil ways." "And yet you still keep him in your employ, father?" answered the clear-eyed girl, her wondering glances gleaming out under a brow of truth.