“Under my daily orders,” she gravely answered. “And you are not to deny that you indulge in private speculations. You are not even to avoid Hathorn’s nearest friends. “Even if Mrs. Volney McMorris should steal into your breakfast room, or a bevy of the gay young matrons, or—even a pretty anonyma—your record as a ‘_preux chevalier_’ in gayest New York will not suffer. You are to be a young man _à la mode_.” Vreeland bowed in a grave silence. That night, when he returned to New York City, to blindly obey his strange patroness, Vreeland’s bosom was big with his happy secrets. “I am to hold the hidden fort ‘of the Sugar treasure.’” He divined a bitter campaign against Hathorn. And he then dreamed a strange, sweet, wicked dream. Alida Hathorn’s stolen visits—with Justine, perhaps—as a dark-eyed devil laughing over the downfall of his enemy’s wife. “I will make my own little game,” he laughed. CHAPTER VII. “PLUNGER” VREELAND’S GAY LIFE, “UNDER THE ROSE.” Before the February snows were congealed into those dirty flakes of ice and street mud which are an evidence of the “effectiveness” of New York’s Street Cleaning department, the “top floor” of the Elmleaf bachelor apartment was considered to set the pace for the gayest of the bachelor apartments of Gotham. The hidden programme was even literally carried out. Outwardly, the daily life of that fortunate individual, Mr. Harold Vreeland, had undergone little change. Once a day he duly occupied his desk at the downtown office, using alternately the morning and afternoon fraction. He proved a very “tough nut to crack” for the local gossips, however. There was a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde flavor of mystery clinging to the audacious young “Westerner.” The slow trots of the “Locust” and the old senile wiseacres of the “Sentinel” clubs wondered at his calm demeanor, his easily acquired repose of the caste of “Vere de Vere.” Vreeland was posing now as a “fixed star.” Not even Bradstreet, or Dun, could seize upon any public delinquencies to the detriment of his “business character,” and yet, Harold Vreeland had rapidly acquired the reputation of a “devil of a fellow.” He had, like Byron, his “hours of idleness.” There was, too, an outward prosperous harmony in the busy office of Wyman and Vreeland, now packed with clerks and forging to the front as a house of unexampled strength. There was a sober, quiet effectiveness in the firm, which shamed the nervous “bucket shop” decadents, who were only noisy, screaming gulls, clamoring over the financial sea for “any old thing” in the way of floating pabulum. It was undeniable that the hats went off to right and left, as Vreeland paced the sacred precincts of Wall, Broad and Pine. A rising man—a successful man—a man of mark! “A safe man, sir! A wonderful young financier! A man whose outside operations are enormous!” gravely said the cashier of the Mineralogical Bank to his esteemed colleague, the cashier of Henry Screws & Company.