Mr. Harold Vreeland was astounded at the golden sunshine of Senator James Garston’s favors which followed on that luncheon at the Plaza Hotel which had made him a sworn knight in the rosy chains of Miss Katharine VanDyke Norreys. There was little to do, for the market was quiescent. Miss Mary Kelly’s desk, too, was vacant, for she lay at home ill with a fever, and it was at the side of the girl’s sick-bed that Mrs. Elaine Willoughby, still feeble and shaken in soul, suddenly seized a photograph from the mantel. “Whose picture is this?” she cried, her voice trembling in the throes of an emotion which swept her loving soul with wonderment and a new hope. BOOK III—On a Lee Shore. CHAPTER XI. MISS MARBLE’S WATERLOO!—A LOST LAMB!—HER VACANT CHAIR.—SENATOR GARSTON’S DISCLOSURE.—SARA CONYERS’ MISSION.—MISS GARLAND’S DISHONORABLE DISCHARGE.—A DEFIANCE TO THE DEATH.—“ROBBED!” In the two weeks after the successful affixing of those snake-like coils of wire which led the private messages of Mme. Elaine Willoughby into janitor Helms’ guarded private apartment, Mr. Harold Vreeland had effected a thorough understanding with that worthy. The trapping devices worked to a charm. All was now ready for a final betrayal. Secure in his autocratic rule, August Helms buried his shock head in the beer seidl and tyrannized with a good-humored roughness over the cringing tradesmen visiting the Circassia, and, a greedy gossip, he made his “coign of vantage” a warm nook for letter-carrier and policeman and the high class “upper servants” of the families who lived above him, in a royal Americanized luxury in that great social fortress, the Circassia. Helms was a modern tyrant. His round, gray-blue eye twinkled as Justine Duprez would slyly slip in and read off the printed tape of the Wheatstone instrument, a duplicate sender and receiver of the same pattern being neatly encased in a pretty cabinet in the pearl boudoir above. And Mrs. Willoughby doubted, feared, suspected—nothing. But all in vain did Helms record the telephoned messages which were trapped on the instrument which was his especial care. There was nothing to record of moment. A lull seemed to hover over every speculative interest of the convalescent woman. The stillness of death now marked Mr. Harold Vreeland’s “business department” at the Elmleaf. The illness of Mary Kelly had cut off all special communication with Mrs. Willoughby at the Circassia, and he had been forced to give Miss Romaine Garland a furlough “under full pay” until Mrs. Willoughby’s trusted operator could resume her desk. The young girl shunned any _tête-à-tête_ labors. It was in virtue of a warning from the acute Joanna Marble that Vreeland gravely bade his mysterious beauty rest herself and “await further orders.”