Her brunette loveliness of face was accentuated by the molded symmetry of her Venus de Milo form. Men knew her only as the childless widowed chatelaine of Lakemere, the inheritor of a vast fortune hazily dating from Colorado. A few cold words from that oracle, Judge Hiram Endicott, had dispelled any doubts as to the authenticity of the late Wharton Willoughby. The checks of the woman whom all had failed to win were considered among the cognoscenti as gilt-edged as Treasury Certificates. The grave glances of her sole attorney and trustee were also a no thoroughfare to prying gossipers, and it was only by a long series of stealthy financial sleuth work that the financial world discovered both “sugar” and “oil” to be as granite buttresses to the unshaken pyramid of her solid wealth. On the Street she was a whirlwind operator—with “inside tips!” As the brougham swung along through Pine Street, Mrs. Willoughby caught a single glimpse of Fred Hathorn, eager-eyed, and hurrying to the Stock Exchange. The man of thirty-five had risen to be a clubman—a yachtsman of renown—a man of settled fortune—and a social lion, too, in the five years since she had opened the gates of her heart to admit the handsome struggling youth, then paddling feebly in Wall Street’s foaming breakers. She leaned back with a sigh. Hathorn’s sudden apparition had opened her eyes to the reason of her dull hatred of the millionaire fiancée. “He is the reason why I hate that girl,” she murmured, with misty lashes, and an old saw came back to her. “It is hard to look out on a lover’s happiness through another man’s eyes!” In the gilded throng at Lakemere, the proprietary endearments of Frederick Hathorn had galled her stormy soul. She knew not that the _parvenu_ broker was only publicly sealing, beyond a doubt, the projected union which would make him the equal in capitalistic reserve of that easy-going Son of Fortune, Potter, to whom all things came around—even Miss Dickie Doubleday’s bills. A ray of light lit up her darkened heart. “Alida is innocent of wrecking my happiness. She could know nothing. For I have been silent! And if I held the ladder, can I blame him for climbing? He needs me no longer. “I have been only a means to an end. Alida will be the last. And then, Frederick Hathorn, Esquire, is safely in the swim!” A sudden conviction of the uselessness of her affectation of a semi-maternal interest in the fortunes of the hardened man of thirty-five told her that she had left all the doors open to him. For there was that in her own life, dating back to her girlhood, which she had never even revealed to her half-lover protégé. With her rich womanly nature sorely shaken, her tender dark eyes drooping, she now owned to the hope, now fled forever, that Hathorn would light the beacon of love in her lonely heart. “I have not trusted him,” she murmured. “He owes me nothing, nothing but gratitude.”