“This surely means a slaughter of the little fishes,” mused Vreeland. Rumors of a reincorporation of the seventy-five million dollar capitalized company in New Jersey, the threatened move to divide its capital stock into common and preferred, were rife on the Street. “Ah!” growled Vreeland, as he glanced over a tabulated statement of the ratings since its organization. “This may either send the stock, now at seventy, down to forty or fifty, or up to a hundred and twenty-five. If I only knew?” He laughed mockingly as he dismissed the subject. “It will only be double or quits.” “Double their wealth for the insiders—and quits for the poor devils squeezed to the wall!” While he waited in the drawing-room for his patroness, the woman whom he began to fear he never would make his dupe or slave, he pondered over her real purposes in the vast hidden speculations. “Has she not already money enough?” he enviously thought, gazing on the heaped-up splendors of costly taste around him. And then, he remembered that he had never met any man, woman, or child in New York City who had money enough. “It’s the fashionable craze—money-getting, by hook or crook,” he reflected. “And once mixed up in the game, it’s hard for her to leave it, especially if she is the go-between who links some of the nation’s statesmen to the great insiders of the Trust. “This home may be only a sham, Lakemere only a way station for the friendly conspirators, and that paper may be a dangerous document which neither side would dare to hold. And old Endicott, too—what’s his rôle?” He was the more interested as Justine had swept away all suspicions of an _amourette_ between the two whom he feared. “Still there is the lost child. If I only knew how old the girl was,” he fretted. “It may be the child of the last decade, or the fruit of a girlish marriage. That secret, and the paper, I must have. “But, Justine must steal the one, and I have got to reach her line of secret communications.” As he met his calmly-smiling secret employer he could not divine the revengeful purposes hidden under her gently-heaving bosom. CHAPTER VIII. MISS ROMAINE GARLAND, STENOGRAPHER. It was late that night when the excited Vreeland left the Circassia and he was still somewhat in the dark as to the real object of his veiled employment. He reasoned justly that there was not a grain of sentiment now in the frankly defined relations between himself and the Lady of Lakemere. The money bond between them was only that cold one of employer and employed, and the unmistakable dignity of Elaine’s business manner held him decidedly aloof. Here was no lover’s thrall. Not a single reference to her absence had escaped her lips. There was no pleasant, social white-lying going on between them, and he was still in the dark when he left, with the strictest orders to await every moment between ten and three, her signal for the beginning of stock operations of gigantic magnitude.