And, to his annoyance, he for the first time found the Parisian woman to be obdurate. She had been curtly abandoned by Hathorn, who had forgotten to hand over her final payment in all the hurried glories of the VanSittart wedding. She alone knew that the vain fool had stupidly imagined that Elaine Willoughby only urged on his marriage in order to be able later to cloak an intimacy which would have later made Justine’s fortune. And now, she would not be balked out of the harvest of fortune. For an hour, the ardent Vreeland pleaded with the artful woman. Her bold eyes, dulled with the bistre stains, gleamed with triumph as he pleaded with her. The elegant young man alternately flattered and caressed the brown-faced _intrigante_, whose coarse beauty had long been the toast of the _cabaret_ which she yearned to possess in Paris. Her voluptuous bosom and heavy haunches were the antipodes of Vreeland’s beauty ideal, and yet, he knelt to flatter and to sue. For she alone could spy upon the most sacred privacy of the woman he had sworn to rule. Justine eyed him keenly, and spoke at last. “Give me a thousand dollars and promise that you will give me a free hand if you marry Madame,” she said, as she yielded to his self-abusing pleadings. “And only you shall know her secrets. I hate that Doctor!” she cried. “I can find out all you want to know, but, you must do as I wish.” Her velvet eyes gleamed in a fierce flame. “Listen, Justine,” urged Vreeland. “To-morrow I will bring you a thousand dollars when I come to the Circassia. Tell me now what you can; I swear to make you rich if you will only stand by me. It is Sunday,” he added. “No banks are open to-day. This first hundred will not count.” And he thrust a bill into her brown hand. “I have watched for years to find the secret of her past life,” promptly said the sly Justine, drawing nearer to Vreeland. “I, too, thought of an _affaire_. It is not. But, _a secret there is_, and only one man knows—the old lawyer. I hid myself near them on his last visit, for they talked long, and Madame fell down fainting after he had gone away. “Their talk was of the old times, and it is always so, when they come to that. But, _this time_ I listened carefully while she moaned in her sorrow.” “And she said?” anxiously cried Vreeland. “‘_My child! My child! Give me back my child!_’ she cried. And so there is a child, and _it is not of the Senator! Voilà!_ They are _stupidement placide toujours! Les affaires!_ Only—_ze monnaie_! She loves him not. And only the old man knows. You shall watch him and her.” A sudden suspicion of a feminine double life brought a name to Vreeland’s lips. “Hathorn!” he said, with a meaning look at his partner in an already vicious intrigue. For Justine Duprez knew him in all the pliant baseness of his real nature, and they had groveled toward each other from the very first. The Parisian gamine laughed a bitter, hard laugh.