"That you have helped me get into," said Wickersham, with a sneer.
"There is no trouble about it," Plume went on. "You don't want to marry anybody else--now, and meantime it will give you the chance you want of controlling old Rawson's interest down there. The old fellow can't live long, and Phrony is his only heir. You will have it all your own way. You can keep it quiet if you wish, and if you don't, you can acknowledge it and bounce your friend Keith. If I had your hand I bet I'd know how to play it."
"Well, by ----! I wish you had it," said Wickersham, angrily.
Wickersham had been thinking hard during Plume's statement of the case, and what with his argument and an occasional application to the decanter of whiskey, he was beginning to yield. Just then a sealed note was handed him by a waiter. He tore it open and read:
"I am going home; my heart is broken. Good-by."
"PHRONY."
"PHRONY."
With an oath under his breath, he wrote in pencil on a card: "Wait; I will be with you directly."
"Take that to the lady," he said. Scribbling a few lines more on another card, he gave Plume some hasty directions and left him.
When, five minutes afterwards, Mr. Plume finished the decanter, and left the hotel, his face had a crafty look on it. "This should be worth a good deal to you, J. Quincy," he said.
An hour later the Rev. Mr. Rimmon performed in his private office a little ceremony, at which, besides himself, were present only the bride and groom and a witness who had come to him a half-hour before with a scribbled line in pencil requesting his services. If Mr. Rimmon was startled when he first read the request, the surprise had passed away. The groom, it is true, was, when he appeared, decidedly under the influence of liquor, and his insistence that the ceremony was to be kept entirely secret had somewhat disturbed Mr. Rimmon for a moment. But he remembered Mr. Plume's assurance that the bride was a great heiress in the South, and knowing that Ferdy Wickersham was a man who rarely lost his head,--a circumstance which the latter testified by handing him a roll of greenbacks amounting to exactly one hundred dollars,--and the bride being very pretty and shy, and manifestly most eager to be married, he gave his word to keep the matter a secret until they should authorize him to divulge it.