And then, Vreeland, taking her hands in his, whispered to her words whereat the busy familiar devil at his side laughed in glee. “If you mean to say yes,” he murmured, “give me that red rose from your breast.” And when he raised his head, the rose in his hand was the pledge of a dark tryst of the devil’s own making. Before he slept, for his throbbing heart would not down in the crowning victory of his revenge upon the desperate Hathorn, he tore open a telegram which marked another milestone of his life. “_Victory!_” he cried, for the words told him of Justine’s success. “They dined to-day alone at the place named, and I have news for you. Coming home, by Pittsburg.” The overjoyed scoundrel cried: “Potter was right, after all. Everything comes round to the man who waits.” For a study of the great journals told him of a forthcoming report fixing the policy of the Government upon the tariff. “If she has the secret, she will surely act upon it,” he cried. “That ties her to the great Sugar Trust’s secret service. Perhaps he trusts her on account of the old love. “Justine shall wrest the proofs from her by either fair means or foul. And, as for to-morrow night—” His lips were parched and dry as he thought of the light foot slipping up the stairway of the Elmleaf—“not with Mrs. McMorris!” He seemed to be wrapped in a golden whirlwind of success. “If she comes once _when she wishes to_, she will come again _when I wish her to_!” gloated the schemer, whose mind was now fixed upon detaching Bagley upon some trumped-up errand and making such a feast as “Rose in bloom” laid out when the hoodwinked “Shah Jehan” was “away” at his palace of Ispahan. “I now hold the cards, and I shall be the victor at last in this game of life,” he swore, as he dreamed of those pleading moonlight eyes. Harold Vreeland waited for two days in a fever of excitement for some mandate from his artful patroness. “She is a sly one at heart, after all, is Mme. Elaine,” he growled. “Her stay ‘at Pittsburg’ is only to throw me off my guard, and perhaps Hathorn. “She may have taken any one of a dozen short roads to steal back from her rendezvous with her senatorial confidant. Friend or lover—_which?_” He groaned in helpless rage. His mean spirit, his hidden vicious agnosticism, made him doubt every woman. To him they were all the same! The biting words of that crooked, malignant genius, Pope, came back: “Every woman is at heart a rake.” “By Jove! I have found them all to be living behind imitation fronts,” he snarled. He was seated in his office watching the pale-faced and silent Mary Kelly, when a street messenger arrived with a card sealed in an ordinary telegraph envelope. It bore only these words, scrawled by the artful Frenchwoman: “Come over to the room.” Stealing a watchful glance at the silent girl in the office, Vreeland hastened away. He had never been able to approach the slightest intimacy with the gray-eyed Irish-American girl.