With a well-judged cautionary wisdom, he also avoided the “Circassia,” which was, indeed, watched by Hathorn’s spies, and he grinned with delight when his growing band of friends re-echoed his own skillfully planted suggestion of a winter trip to Europe. “I _am_ thinking of an extended tour,” he frankly admitted, and he soon knew that this had reached the humiliated Hathorn, for James Potter, Esq., in a personal visit, urged Vreeland to join him in that memorable expedition to “Swat,” which was to throw the _mutine_ Miss Dickie Doubleday forever “off the track.” “I’ll give you a carte blanche as my guest, Vreeland,” laughed Potter. “You can take anybody you want on my yacht—_save only that bright-eyed devil, Dickie_.” It was evident Hathorn had not “blabbed,” for Potter gaily said: “I don’t blame you for keeping out of business. Lucky dog that you are—Hathorn has got a first-class man, Renard Wolfe, to go in as active, and I relapse into a special partner—but we would have sooner had you.” When Vreeland hastened back to Lakemere, in answer to a laconic dispatch, “_Come up at once_,” he knew of the increasing bitterness of the impending war. Mrs. Willoughby, riding through Pine Street, had given her one-time protégé Hathorn the dead cut, before a dozen magnates of Wall and Broad, to their open-eyed amazement. Every broker on the Street was now eager to snap up “the Willoughby’s” business, and Mr. James Potter, abstracting a “Gaiety Girl” from an inchoate visiting troupe, had hastily set sail for “Swat,” via the Suez canal, with a little _partie carrée_ to avoid a storm of queries—couched with “Say, old fellow, what the old Harry’s all this rumpus between the Hathorns and your ‘star’ customer?” The placid Potter, far out beyond Fire Island, delightedly left the “high contracting parties” to fight it out between them, _à la mode de Kilkenny_. And, the wonder grew as the golden letters “Hathorn, Wolfe & Co.” soon took the place of the conquering device, “Hathorn & Potter,” over the door of the booth in Mammon’s mart where Elaine Willoughby’s helping hand had built up the fortune of the ingrate protégé. The handsome Vreeland was light-hearted as he approached Lakemere, for he was pondering over a letter of special invitation received to a _diner de cérémonie_ to emphasize the reopening of Mrs. Alida Hathorn’s superb Fifth Avenue mansion, a patrimonial hereditament gloriously embourgeoned for that winter social campaign in which Mrs. Alida proposed to crush “that woman Willoughby.” The young matron had taken the bit between her teeth and was boldly rallying all her clans, with a fine social programme adapted to both attract the “outer woman,” and charm the “inner man.”