“She is a sly one. She may be trading coldly on the secrets of the Sugar magnates, possibly selling out her senatorial friends and betraying old Endicott’s banking connections. “Her social entertainments, those little confidences of the ‘pearl boudoir,’ give her a safe chance to play these men off, the one against the other.” Vreeland’s San Francisco experience, his analytical brain, and his quick wit, had enabled him in his few months of New York stock speculating, to quietly pick up every trick of the “put, call and straddle,” every dark cross of the bucket-shop infamy, every “dummy” subterfuge used in “shearing the sheep.” He knew now every mystery of “doubled trades,” “crossing trades,” and “wiping out a margin.” “She has evidently never trusted me for a single moment, and, has covered her right hand, while she has played me as a ‘left bower.’” It dawned upon him that she perhaps, like David, said in her heart, “All men are liars.” That her “developing process” with Fred Hathorn had made her “sadly wise,” and that she was “trying him out” now at every distance, before making him a champion. He had, however, preserved the same even, devoted watchful courtesy, and he was wise enough not to try to jump blindly from “seed time” to harvest. “She has not opened her heart to me; if she ever marries me, it will only be when she is driven to my arms. “But, I can wait.” And, so, never having dipped deeper into any true woman’s heart than the light-winged swallow brushing the lake, he forgot that he was not true to her. He knew not the force of those ringing lines of “A Fo’castle Ballad”: “If you’re good to her, she’s good to you! For a woman’s square, if you treat her right!” The morning found the energetic Mr. Harold Vreeland in close conference with the thin-lipped Miss Marble, of “Marble’s Business Agency,” near that dingy little square where Greeley in bronze gazes vacantly down at his own feet, awed by the stony glare of the New York Herald’s singularly inartistic owls. The wary woman broker had listened in silence to the young banker’s long description of his need of an accomplished “private secretary.” She flushed slightly when Vreeland mentioned the Elmleaf as the scene of the varied “labors.” The quiet orgies of that “whited sepulchre” were now the theme of much whispered comment over the whole Tenderloin. There were other “rising men” besides Harold Vreeland burning the candle of Life at both ends there and covertly reënacting the lurid scenes of old Monte Tiberio, and infamous Baiæ. “Expense is no object, my dear Miss Marble,” softly purred Vreeland. “I fancy you know now what I want. I would prefer a capable young woman who is a stranger to New York City. “One who has been accustomed to refinement. My private correspondence is largely social.” The handsome scoundrel’s eye sunk under the keen woman’s direct thrust.