He was startled as, when about to enter the wagonette, a village lad on watch shyly bade him walk into the ladies’ waiting room, where the adroit Justine was waiting for him with tidings of moment. Mr. Harold Vreeland had won the caoutchouc heart of the piercing-eyed French soubrette by his golden largesse. He had learned the importance of “parting freely” when it was to his profit, and several hundred dollars of Jimmy Potter’s poker money had already enlarged the growing hoard with which Justine proposed to buy a neat cabaret in Paris and set up a bull-throated gamin whom she resolutely adored. “Be on your guard!” Justine whispered. “Mr. Hathorn has just now tried to bribe me to watch you and Mrs. Willoughby. He has tormented Doctor Hugo Alberg, also. The Doctor is my friend,” modestly admitted Justine, with the deference of dropped eyes to her imperiled “character.” “I have been down at New York arranging the ‘Circassia’ for our home-coming. Hathorn has offered Doctor Alberg anything to bring him once more accidentally into Mrs. Willoughby’s presence. “He came up yesterday to Lakemere—and yet Madame absolutely declined to see him, and so she returned his card. And, to the old lawyer, _ce brav’ vieux_ Endicott, he, too, has made the call—‘to demand a hearing’—as an old friend. “I heard Madame and the Judge talking. And now—to-day—there are the Senator, the journalist, Monsieur Conyers, and the Judge Endicott all day in the library with Madame. So, _mon ami_, beware!” The fifty-dollar bill which Vreeland pressed into her hand was an inspirational piece of good judgment, and Gallic prayers from a too-inflammable heart followed him as he darted away to the wagonette. “I will back the Queen of Hearts to win!” mused the vigilant Vreeland, as he arranged his “society face” for that watchful and nonchalant repose which totally disarmed the three men whom he met at dinner. There was not an awkward undercurrent of import to the evening in which Harold Vreeland, forewarned and forearmed, knew that he was always “under fire”—that greatest test of nerve—simply bidden to “stand fast and wait for orders.” He watched the “casement’s glimmering square” long after the house was still, slowly revolving his crafty plans, and as yet ignorant of the day’s secret council so vital to his future career. He knew not of the sympathetic silence of Conyers, his fine intellectual face hidden in a window’s shadow, while Endicott had frankly related all that he had known unfavorable of the late Erastus Vreeland, Attorney and Counselor at Law, Solicitor in Equity, and Proctor in Admiralty.