The young Crœsus arose unsteadily, and said, “Come to breakfast with me at the Union to-morrow—that is to say, to-day,” he chuckled. “Well, let us have one hour’s poker—you and me—and with no limit—just for fun. “You owe me a revenge. Now, remember—I have warned you. Look out that Hathorn don’t get onto your little game—dig a pit—and drop you in it. “He’s grown to be an ether drinker now, and his wife is as cold-hearted an egoist as breathes. Just dead gone on herself—and her own pretty bodily mechanism. If he ever gets in an ugly money corner, she won’t give him a sou marqué. “Now, Elaine Willoughby has ‘held up her end of the log’ against some of the stiffest men in Wall Street. She is smarter than a whole stack of Hathorns. I know in the outside companies that I am director of, she has loads of the best paying permanent investments. “And if she ever catches Hathorn nosing into her affairs, or yours, for I know your firm does a part of her business, she will smash up Fred Hathorn like the ‘Mary Powell’ going over a rowboat.” With an affected unconcern, Vreeland saw his friend disappear in a night hour club coupé, after swearing fidelity to the poker tryst. But his heart was beating wildly, as he crawled upstairs in the gray of the dawn. “That’s her game; defense and revenge! I wonder if Hathorn really traced her out to Colorado, and has he an inkling of Alva Whiting? “He’s not above levying a blackmail. And I am in some strange way her pawn in this veiled duel to the death, a duel between a man and woman who may have often rested in each other’s arms with vows of deathless love. “It may be only self-protection that made her shove him off on Alida VanSittart. How she hurried on that marriage? “Was it jealousy, fear, or some of her craft? And I am used—used and only half trusted. “Wait! Lady Mine! If Justine only plays me fair, I will have got all your game—and then I’ll be master of you, Lakemere and the money. Once inside your lines, then you will never be able to throw me off.” He was beginning to see the threads of the swift current now. His own expression, “inside your lines,” haunted him through his three hours’ sleep, his bath, and early breakfast. Vreeland had the nerves of the Iron Duke, and he burned for a few words with Justine, who was to seek him that very morning, at her nest in South Fifth Avenue. For there was a southward trip impending, and he wished to give his one faithful spy her orders. “If I could only get at the wires in her room! If I could only manage to tap her talk and messages to old Endicott! For this woman here in the office is surely her spy. Bagley may be. “By Heavens! There is just one chance. And her mail! Justine may help me. What can she not do?”