There was hardly a financier in the house party, Noel Endicott’s visit of a day being a mere duty call. “She evidently wishes to hide our intimacy from all, and to publicly impress only the social character on our friendship,” mused Vreeland. “Lady mine! you are a deep one!” he mused. Never had he been placed next to her at dinner, and even at the cotillion’s trifling favors she had only sought him among the very last. He was aware that all New York knew of how Hathorn had been coached up by her into financial glory. “That mistake she will not repeat. It’s a case of blood and the secret warpath, now,” reflected Vreeland. But with the check for twenty-five thousand dollars in his pocket, he felt that his silence was paid for in advance. He was swimming gaily on with the current now. He had calmed Dr. Hugo Alberg down into an expectant friendship by agreeing to dine with him once a week and to exchange regular reports at Martin’s. “So far, I have found out nothing, Doctor,” said the lying Vreeland; “but I have written out West. I understand that she has immense properties in Colorado. If I get a clew, you and I will work it up together. “In the meantime watch over her yourself, and then tell me all.” Alberg was in high glee at his social début, and confided to Vreeland that their patroness was in the most brilliant health. “_Well_,” good-humoredly answered Vreeland, “between you and me we will manage to guard her and take care of her property, if she will only let us.” The miserly German’s eyes gleamed as they drank to their private pact. “The great thing is to keep every one else away from her,” whispered Alberg. “I of course watch her professionally. You must keep off all those society sharks like that upstart Hathorn.” “Trust to me. I know my business,” laughed Vreeland. When Vreeland left Lakemere on the last day of the old year, his only reminder was the whispered word, “Remember!” “I will wait at the Waldorf,” he answered, with a last meaning gleam in his eyes. Standing now on an almost secure pedestal, Vreeland never dared to dream of the sentimental approach upon the woman who was now the sole arbiter of his destiny. “That would be the clumsiest mistake of all,” he decided. “Only—when she comes into the net—I will tighten it.” He well knew that the bachelor apartment was to be the scene of some veiled financial strategy and not a rosy Paphian bower. Mean and low at heart as he was, he knew that her soul towered above all low deceit, as the rosy Jungfrau lifts its unsullied peaks to the blue skies. The one rare virtue of this scoundrel in embryo was that no inane self-conceit clouded his clear and mercilessly direct reasoning. “I am only her tool as yet,” he reflected. “But the Endicotts, Aubrey Maitland, and Wyman are to know nothing! This, of course, excludes Senator Alynton. She trusts me then _alone_—of the whole world.” And so, he panted for the coming solution of the enigma.