It was only with a severe struggle that he concealed the secret joy now burning in his heart, and he carefully laid out all his plans for the crucial week to come. He must widen the breach. There was the conference with Senator Alynton, Hiram Endicott, and that strange “big brother,” Hugh Conyers. He felt instinctively that these three men would not share “Madonna’s” enthusiasm. He aimed to continually efface himself and to allow the resentful woman to goad herself along in the path of social and financial revenge. “Any fool can stand hard times, but it takes a wise man to keep his head, under a run of winning luck!” he mused, with reminiscences of “Mr. John Oakhurst” and his pithy proverb, that “the luck usually got tired—before the man did.” He retraced his steps to the house, and was most calmly quiescent and tenderly respectful in his adieu. “That burst of confidence has fixed her—_for good_!” he mused. “You are to report to me, here, by letter, the result of your interview with that man!” hurriedly whispered Elaine Willoughby, as her “knight” turned toward the wagonette. “I will summon you here, when Alynton comes. Do nothing else. Leave all to me.” And his eyes burned into her soul, as he promised a happy slave’s obedience. The bright smile of the dark-eyed enthusiast haunted him all the way to New York. “Talleyrand was right,” he murmured, at ease in the parlor car, “_Point de zèle!_ She will make all the running for me.” He enjoyed the salutations showered right and left on him, as the train picked up the men of note carrying the hopes and fears of a new week to Gotham. “I am a somebody now!” he grinned. The rising light of the Sentinel and Locust clubs, the man who had superbly engineered the brilliant Hathorn-VanSittart’s nuptials—“the great Montana capitalist,” was surely a man of mark, and Nature’s easy gifts had earned him a warm welcome in the slightly jaded circles of the Four Hundred. He was, moreover, a “new face,” and several spasms of unrest under aristocratic corsages had already proved that there were eyes “which brightened when he came.” As for his false _rôle_ of man of leisure and _élégant_—“custom of it, had made a property of easiness.” “I am a fraud—and—half these anæmic swells are fools as well as frauds!—I am content!” he smilingly decided, as he reviewed his plans for a daring course during the next trying week. As he had surmised, a telegram awaited him at the Waldorf from the returned Hathorn. It was of a simple directness. “Meet me to-night, seven. Old York Club. Must have your answer reconsidered. Every inducement possible.” The subtle smile of triumph which played around his lips recalled Private Ortheri’s stern remark, “See that beggar—got him!”—as he dropped the faraway Pathan with the “long shot.”