“Another big deal in ‘Sugar,’” he suddenly thought, and he felt himself perhaps hoodwinked by both Senators and the handsome woman who had so artfully led him on to his fate. “It may be that they all are fooling me; I may have been merely jockeyed away. Mrs. Willoughby can work the ‘off side’ of her deals alone from the ‘Elmleaf,’ and the regular transactions will go on as usual through our firm, really Alynton & Willoughby. Or, she may have picked up another protégé. God only knows what a woman may do. “They all have their secrets, by Jove! Senator Garston or this cool devil, Hugh Conyers, may now turn up as the secret broker in my place.” It suddenly occurred to him that the powerful Western millionaire might really be the favored lover, and Alynton, after all, only the dupe of a growing passion. “I am powerless to go further now,” he groaned, as he gazed at the rooms where his lovely and exacting bride was “squeezing the orange of life” to its last drop. He had found out, even now, that there were thorns upon his rosebud. He was not yet entirely satisfied with the status of husband so recently assumed. Still affecting all the delicacy of the lover, he had, however, quite practically approached the subject of Katharine Norreys’ investments “in the hands of Uncle James.” And he soon found out that the exquisite form of his dazzling blonde wife hid a resolute and undaunted spirit, an unruffled temper, and an easy, natural defiance of all marital control. “Where did she get her experience of life?” mused the startled bridegroom. “You must go over all these tiresome matters, Harold, with Uncle James, on our return,” the overwearied, fashionable bride answered. “I have never entered into any details with him, and I supposed, of course, that you and he had covered all this ground. I have only asked him for money as I needed it since my return, and he has always sent me his checks. It is for you, both business men, to regulate such matters.” And she cast her eyes down again on her entrancing book. “Then you have no permanent bank account of your own?” moodily demanded Vreeland. “Why should I have one?” innocently replied Mrs. Katharine Vreeland, “when Uncle James has always paid the bills and furnished me all that I ask? I have never asked him for any formal accounting.” Harold Vreeland was secretly nettled at her easy carelessness. “And if he were to die, if anything happened, you would then know nothing of your own affairs,” said the dissatisfied husband. “No more than I know now of yours, my dear,” calmly answered Katharine, settling herself deeper in her cushions. “Uncle James simply told me that you were a very rich man, and of course, I took his word. I have not asked you to inventory your own possessions.” She was turning an unusually interesting leaf as Vreeland walked out of the cabin in a suppressed rage.