“No! by Jove! No row here!” he muttered, and when he sauntered downstairs with an assumed carelessness, his guest had departed. There was a “lively interlude in married life” transacted late that evening “behind closed doors,” at the Buckingham, in which Mr. Frederick Hathorn, for the second time that evening, suffered a sore defeat, and “went below” to seek the consolation of Otard-Dupuy & Co.’s very ripe old pale cognac. That bright-eyed falcon, Alida Hathorn, then and there ran up the red flag of “War to the Knife”—and “No Surrender!” But the jubilant Harold Vreeland slept not till he had personally, at Broadway and Twenty-third Street, sent off an urgent dispatch to Lakemere. “I think that reads strongly enough,” chuckled Vreeland, as he gazed on the words. “He played the craven. Wanted me to give him secret reports of your affairs, and then demanded his letters back. All relations are permanently broken off. Will guard absolute silence.” It was at his leisurely breakfast in the Palm Garden, the next morning, that Vreeland, with a wildly-beating heart, tore open “Madonna’s” answering message. He stifled the cry of exultation which rose to his lips, for the Rubicon was passed. It was really now “_Guerra à cuchillo!_” Elaine Willoughby’s words were replete with that _fortiter in re_ which the unlucky Hathorn was destined later to realize. He only knew her _suaviter in modo_. “_Ignore him. Be ready to report when I call you. Party from Washington expected in three days. Stand to your colors!_” The signature, “_True Blue_,” was a reminder of their secret pact. “I think, Mr. Frederick Hathorn, that I have you ‘dead to rights’ now,” mused Vreeland, who determined that the “social war” should blaze up fiercely, but without his hand at the bellows. A round of calls in the next three days proved to him that Mrs. Alida Hathorn had harked back on all the old intimacy of the unhappy bridegroom, and was diligently sowing broadcast the Cadmus teeth of merciless and pointed satire upon the “sunset beauty on the retired list.” “_A woman old enough to be my mother!_” When appealed to by many bright-eyed _banditti_, Mr. Harold Vreeland merely sadly shook his head in a vague deprecation. “I know nothing whatever,” he softly sighed. “All this sudden gossip is Greek to me, Greek of Cimmerian darkness.” In the two clubs which he most affected, Vreeland—in a manly burst of platform oratory—when appealed to by eager quidnuncs—sternly announced his code. “I never take a woman’s name on my lips in gossip. I know nothing, I have heard nothing—and—excuse me—I will listen to nothing. Both the ladies are valued friends of mine.” He was voted a “thoroughbred.” But, in his craven heart, he rejoiced at the rapid spreading of the war. Knowing that Hathorn would watch him, he avoided lower New York until after Madame Elaine Willoughby had made one brief downtown visit for a serious consultation with her agent, Endicott.