“The Lady of the Red Rose will visit you at ten to-morrow night. Remember your promise. _Fail not._ She will be veiled and dressed in black. _Be alone._ And, at your door, _at ten_.” “They are all the same,” he gasped, with a wildly beating heart, “under the rose, lurks always some wild intrigue, some desperate game. “Life in New York is only a game of catch who catch can.” And, when the sunset of the next day came, Mr. Harold Vreeland had dispatched the acute Bagley to Boston with a “valuable package” to be deposited in a Safe Deposit Company there, and he was seated in his own room gazing tenderly upon the crimsoned flowers whose mute incense filled the air. The crawling hands of the clock were a torture to the man whose darkest purpose was now hidden behind a smiling face—for it is not often given, even to a smooth scoundrel, to betray two women at once. He was swimming in a sea of glory, now. Vreeland slept but little after his conference with his resolute and beautiful patroness. He had scanned her face keenly to see the “sweet unrest of Love,” or the play of a hidden passion written there, but all that the keen schemer could discern was the calmness of a settled purpose, the poise of an unshaken self-control. “She has either no heart, or else, a marvelous power of dissimulation,” he wearily decided. He felt that she was playing some great hidden game in which he was but a mere pawn, a poor private soldier in the fight. “It’s a waiting game,” he rightly concluded, “but, it is for vengeance, or a fight to cover up her clouded past.” He knew now that Elaine Willoughby was victorious over her young social enemy at every point of the field. For, the house of Hathorn was known to be divided against itself, and the once magnificent Frederick’s careworn brow showed a sullen discontent. Hathorn’s disgruntled face was now too often reflected in the mirrors of the Café Savarin bar; he was shunned at the clubs even by the young _flâneurs_ who had now gone over bodily to Mrs. Willoughby, and the little Sunday afternoon _séances_ at Mrs. Alida Hathorn’s became noted for their daring _camaraderie_ and the “high class vaudeville” enacted there. Hathorn was now more frequently absent from town “upon business,” and Vreeland wrongly suspected him of tracing down the past antecedents of “his dearest foe.” “What the old Harry did she throw him over and pick me up for?” he vainly pondered. “She may have found him creeping too closely on her track and perhaps she feared him. “To cut the cord, she has pushed him out, and, pensioned him off on Alida. “But, what chilling spectre of the past affrights her? That I can only reach by tapping her secret lines. “I must get in between Endicott and her. I must find out her relations with the Sugar Trust, and also get at the underground railroad to the chamber where the first news of the secret operations of the ‘Senate Finance Committee’ makes her the witch of the Street.