Deliberately selecting two one hundred dollar bills from his wallet, Arthur Ferris held them up to the astonished gaze of Einstein. "Mr. Clayton has been a little strange in his behavior lately," he said. "In some tiff he has thrown up his old rooms, and is going to move. I will be away three or four days. When I come back, I want to know just where he is located, and—all about him; who his friends are, and so on. There is more where this came from."
"I understand," smoothly answered Emil, pocketing the bills with a grin.
In the meantime Ferris had scribbled a few words on a card. He stopped the carriage. "Jump out and take a coupe, and get instantly down to Wall and Broad. You'll find Mr. Somers waiting in the election-room. Tell him not to leave there till I get him on the 'phone from Jersey City. And my address you can give him as Lafayette House, Philadelphia. I'll be there three days." The lie was deliberate, and even the triple spy believed him.
The long hours crawled away while Randall Clayton resolutely paced his lonely office. Only the busy under-accountants came in now and then for a word of directions, and the ticking of the office clock sounded like the hollow tapping of hammers upon coffin-lids to the solitary man who was crazed with his loving anxiety to hear from the woman who now ruled his every thought.
He forgot the absence of Einstein in his eager waiting for some intelligence of the woman whom he had shielded from the storm. Poor Madame Raffoni had mumbled some obscure words about "die herz-kranke."
"Heartsick, my God! I am heartsick," cried Randall Clayton. "And, she may be alone; there may be no one to send."
Clayton tried to recall the last directions which he had given to the disguised Leah Einstein. All that he could recall was the murmured pledge, "I will come, I will come!"
The lover's heart told him that Ferris' spies would now follow in his every movement. He lingered, in a trance of agony, until long after the parchment-faced Somers had returned from Wall and Broad Street.
"It was a very quiet election," murmured Somers, who started at the appearance of the young man's haggard face. He was astonished to see Clayton lingering there to the confines of darkness.
The faithful old tool of Mammon had crawled back to turn all his combination knobs and cast a last glance over the rooms into which his life had grown as the silkworm into its cocoon.