“I need you in your place to keep her quiet, and whether you wish to or not, you shall wait. That’s all.” The iron fist of the statesman made the glasses ring in an angry emphasis. “You had better watch over your wife and keep her friendly with Mrs. Willoughby than try to budge me. I need both your help now, and, I propose to have it,” was Garston’s last shot, as he strode away. Certainly “Uncle James” did not mince matters. And as the days drifted on, Vreeland became an object of remark, even in the hurry of Wall Street. His wife seemed to be on terms of a frank social intimacy with the Lady of Lakemere, but the man whom all had envied was rapidly becoming a profitable habitué of the Café Savarin. It was the beginning of the end of the “splendid run of luck.” The funds received from Senator Garston, his purchase price, had been seriously depleted by the young wife’s extravagance, and soon, both roundsman Dan Daly and the cool Noel Endicott laid before Mrs. Elaine Willoughby the proof of Harold Vreeland’s heavy outside speculations in the “active stocks.” The desperate man was “plunging” now blindly. Both of these secret agents marveled, in their different interviews, when the Queen of the Street answered the mute inquiries of their eyes: “Just let him go on; do nothing whatever to interrupt him. Only report all to me.” And onward dashed Vreeland toward unknown reefs of woe. She knew, too, that a haggard-eyed man often stole over the walls of Lakemere, like a thief in the night, now, to meet Justine Duprez, who was just beginning in her own cowardly heart, to wonder whether a frank confession might not save her. For there were no “sure tips” now to aid Harold Vreeland’s redoubled plunging, and the “strong spirit of wine” was burning away the brain of the man whose once handsome face was now distorted with racking emotions and bloated by cognac. He was on a steep “down grade.” “He may kill me!” tremblingly whispered Justine, who secretly counted up her gains safely stored away in Paris. “I might tell them all, and then go away over there. Dare I speak?” She began to watch, with a sinking heart, the clear, unflinching eyes of her mistress, now glowing in all the awakened love of her satisfied motherhood. “Not yet, not yet, only at the very last!” was the cowardly woman’s decision, as she crept to the safety of her room. The French maid’s cowardly terror escaped not her mistress’ eyes. If she had known that “Martha Wilmot” had secretly crossed the Atlantic and was now hidden away under Roundsman Daly’s charge, that news would have brought Justine at once, a shivering culprit, to her mistress’ feet. And now, others than Vreeland were playing a sure and waiting game.