“To protect my interests you must at once leave the Waldorf. “Trust to me!” she smiled. “I will have your bachelor apartments ready. And no one, not even Wyman, must ever learn of your ‘secret service.’ Silence and obedience, and your fortune is assured. You alone shall battle for me and drive this fool Hathorn forever from the Street. “Go now! You will leave with the first departing guests, but await my telegram at the Waldorf to come to me here. And so, I have your plighted word. Never a whisper to a living soul. You are to be still only the office partner—_to the world_!” Vreeland snatched her trembling hand and kissed it. It was burning in fever. But he sped away, and before the curtain rose to a chorus of happy laughter and shouts of delighted surprise, a glance in a corner of the hallway where Justine awaited him showed him a check for twenty-five thousand dollars as his Christmas gift. His patroness had handed him the precious envelope in silence. In a low whisper he opened the gates of paradise to the French woman, who watched her lover with flaming eyes. “Five thousand dollars of this to you, if you find out for me the secret of that child.” And he left her, panting with the thrill of a sated avarice. “I will go through fire and water to serve you,” she faltered. “I will steal the secret from her midnight dreams.” That night, after the gay dances were done, when the house was stilled, Elaine Willoughby sat before her fire, while Justine laid away the regal robes. There was the glitter of diamonds and the shimmer of pearls everywhere. With her hands clasped, the lonely mistress of Lakemere gazed into the dancing flames. “I must crush him—to leave the past buried—that I may yet find the path trodden by those little wandering feet. “Ah, my God!” she moaned, “it is not revenge that I want. It is love—_her love_—I burn to know her mine alone. And the past shall be kept as a sealed book, for her dear sake. It must be so. It is the only way. For, Vreeland is brave and true!” The handsome hypocrite was even then dreaming of a “double event,” a duplicated prize, one beyond his wildest hopes. “By heaven! I’ll have both her and the fortune!” His busy, familiar devil “laughed by his side.” BOOK II—With the Current. CHAPTER VI. IN THE “ELMLEAF” BACHELOR APARTMENTS. Mr. Harold Vreeland silently wondered at the protean character of womanhood as he watched Mrs. Elaine Willoughby’s almost feverish gaiety in the few days which followed their new relation. “I can believe anything of a woman’s subtle arts after this,” he wonderingly said, as he made himself a graceful factor in the joys under holly and mistletoe. Not a single reference to the coming business had ever escaped her, and she was as merrily impartial in her favors as a girl at her first ball.