Hiram Endicott alone knew of the coolly-devised scheme by which the woman whom he had deceived had made Hathorn’s marriage and enforced absence the epoch for a complete break-off of all business relations. But she, deluded, as even the keenest mortals are, in stocks, love, or war, only feared for the one darling secret of her heart—that veiled sorrow which lay behind Hiram Endicott’s useless search of years. And in the defense of that one pure and unsullied memory, she would have torn herself from Hathorn’s arms even at the altar. For there is a love which can tear the face of any man from a true woman’s heart—the mother love. Before Harold Vreeland reached New York he had decided upon the “Sugar speculations” as the secret reason for setting up the “bachelor apartment.” It was now a matter of gossip on the Street that the great Standard Oil Company was reaching its octopus arms out for “safe investments,” as well as sure new speculative fields. To use a huge surplus of idle money and an inexhaustible credit, it was rumored that they proposed to sneak into a quiet mastery of the American Sugar Refinery Company’s outside stock, and even in time to gather in all the great Gas monopolies of Manhattan Island. “_That’s my lady’s game!_” gleefully cried Vreeland. “She could crush Hathorn at will. Their business is ruined. The ugly rumors as to his shabby behavior to her have hurt that firm. “And Potter, too, is about to draw out. Wolfe has no money to speak of. ‘Missie VanSittart’ will not pay her husband’s stock losses, not she.” Harold Vreeland grinned, for the young woman’s name was even now lightly bandied by the club jackals, but only _sotto voce_, in deference to her social rank. “That’s her little game! She dares not let Alynton know that she proposes to dally with the other side in this coming fight of giants. “She proposes to ‘copper’ the game of ‘more sweetness and light,’ as well as play it for a sure winner. “And I am to be her _left hand_, and the _right_ (our firm) is to be ignorant of what the left doeth!” He was well aware that in some way she was always early possessed of all the Sugar Syndicate secrets. Whether Endicott, Alynton, the statesman, or Conyers was her coach, he knew not. “Perhaps all three—the law, the senate, and journalism,” he grinned. “_Or, is she going to betray these people to the newcomers?_ There would be enormous profits in that ‘sweet surrender.’ “I shall enjoy the run, and be in at the death,” he gaily cried, as he sought his hotel in a vastly enhanced good humor. When he entered the Waldorf, a sudden encounter made him think that angels of light had invaded the crepuscular gloom of the long hall in the early winter evening. He scarcely credited his senses when Mrs. Frederick Hathorn motioned him to a corner of the Turkish room, after his startled but gravely polite salute. The lady was a ravishing example of the “survival of the fittest” in the line of Worth, Pingât, and Redfern.