In the swim

FOR THE CHILD’S SAKE!

The crowding passengers lounging on the decks of the “Campania” and “Normandie” idly watched the fleeting waves torn up by the ocean racers as they swept by each other in mid-ocean four days later, but there were strangely agitated hearts, too, on the passing steamers, when the signal flags were broken out.

For, the secret enemies now swept past each other at the distance of a few furlongs.

“What the devil can the real motive of her quick return be?” angrily mused bridegroom Vreeland, as he called up again Senator Garston’s baffled fury on learning that for all his goading on, his detectives had failed to locate the missing Romaine Garland.

He led his beautiful bride back to her room, and then left her to the enjoyment of “Les Denis-Vierges,” while he eyed the fast-receding “Normandie.”

“Another big deal in ‘Sugar,’” he suddenly thought, and he felt himself perhaps hoodwinked by both Senators and the handsome woman who had so artfully led him on to his fate. “It may be that they all are fooling me; I may have been merely jockeyed away. Mrs. Willoughby can work the ‘off side’ of her deals alone from the ‘Elmleaf,’ and the regular transactions will go on as usual through our firm, really Alynton & Willoughby. Or, she may have picked up another protégé. God only knows what a woman may do.

It suddenly occurred to him that the powerful Western millionaire might really be the favored lover, and Alynton, after all, only the dupe of a growing passion. “I am powerless to go further now,” he groaned, as he gazed at the rooms where his lovely and exacting bride was “squeezing the orange of life” to its last drop. He had found out, even now, that there were thorns upon his rosebud.

He was not yet entirely satisfied with the status of husband so recently assumed. Still affecting all the delicacy of the lover, he had, however, quite practically approached the subject of Katharine Norreys’ investments “in the hands of Uncle James.”

And he soon found out that the exquisite form of his dazzling blonde wife hid a resolute and undaunted spirit, an unruffled temper, and an easy, natural defiance of all marital control. “Where did she get her experience of life?” mused the startled bridegroom.

“You must go over all these tiresome matters, Harold, with Uncle James, on our return,” the overwearied, fashionable bride answered.

“I have never entered into any details with him, and I supposed, of course, that you and he had covered all this ground. I have only asked him for money as I needed it since my return, and he has always sent me his checks. It is for you, both business men, to regulate such matters.” And she cast her eyes down again on her entrancing book.

“Then you have no permanent bank account of your own?” moodily demanded Vreeland.

“And if he were to die, if anything happened, you would then know nothing of your own affairs,” said the dissatisfied husband.

“No more than I know now of yours, my dear,” calmly answered Katharine, settling herself deeper in her cushions. “Uncle James simply told me that you were a very rich man, and of course, I took his word. I have not asked you to inventory your own possessions.”

She was turning an unusually interesting leaf as Vreeland walked out of the cabin in a suppressed rage.

“We are both at sea, it appears,” was his disquieting thought, and again the remembrances of that slender family tree of his lovely wife annoyed him. It seemed to begin and end in the graves of the dead parents, who were only gruesome shadows.

“I will go over this whole ugly matter with Garston at once, just as soon as I see him,” was Vreeland’s mental decision. “Katharine is either a child-wife of the Dora order, or else far deeper than the sea that we are skimming over now.”

It came to him cogently that he had taken her “on trust” largely, and that a current of life’s mysterious undertow had swept him along into Senator Garston’s power. There was no going back, however.

“It is too late to hesitate now,” he mused, as he uneasily gazed back toward America, well knowing that some giant game might be played in his absence.

“Justine Duprez stands between me and all harm. That was a master-stroke! And so I can cut into the game as I wish, on my return. The very first thing I shall do will be to get Katharine’s fortune out of Garston’s control. He shall face the music. And yet, I can afford no quarrel until that is all safe.”

In the month which followed this vain attempt at probing the financial resources of the wife of his bosom, Mr. Harold Vreeland, at the Hotel Cecil, London, found the beautiful Katharine’s money-spending power to be something abnormal.

There was a rapid exchange of letters and cable ciphers between Garston and the young broker spy, but the husband was never enlightened as to the nature of the frequent telegrams and letters passing between “Uncle James” and his ward.

It vastly annoyed him—this continued private commerce of ideas.

The questions of the husband were frankly enough met. “I have always been accustomed to do exactly as I pleased,” the lady remarked, with a bright, hard smile. Vreeland’s face hardened.

“And now, that you are married?” demanded Vreeland, angrily.

“I shall continue to do so, Harold,” his wife sweetly replied.

“If you would have me lead a Darby and Joan life, please to remember that sort of thing went out with the ‘Rollo books’ and ‘Faith Gartney’s Girlhood!’”

These ardent cavaliers seemed to be all wifeless, and, strangely enough too, without mothers or sisters. “‘Uncle James’ friends,” was Mrs. Vreeland’s saving clause, when at last her angered husband remonstrated at their increasing circle. He was beginning to be agnostic as to her guilelessness.

And on their removal to Paris, where certain of these “friends” soon after appeared, Katharine Vreeland bravely continued “to do as she pleased,” and her now bitter husband partook himself to sparkling wine and “the sights of Paris.”

He was driven along from day to day, for he had no reliable news from the seat of war. He realized that he was alone in the world and without one trusty friend. His wife was only a bright enigma.

“The lone-hand game has its disadvantages, I perceive,” was his bitter secret comment, as he tired of the Hotel Continental—the perfunctory drives in the Bois, the open summer amusements—and visibly fretted at his wife’s endless shopping.

Even with Garston’s substantial bribe, he began to see that Mrs. Katharine Vreeland’s “separate estate” was to become a very “burning question”—in the near future.

She was a “money-eater” of the first class.

Harold Vreeland was now mentally tired of the by-play of marital fencing. He realized, in all their varied encounters, that she was calmly superior at every clash.

Bright, bold and ready, she “came back at him” every time, and he was quietly cornered by that flashing rapier, her tongue. What man can prevail against that two-edged sword?

But one resource was left. He had run the gamut of sullenness, persuasion, a bit of bullying, some pleading and even a touch of lofty tenderness, but her point was carried high, her wrist easy, and her blade opposed to him at every turn.

He could not avouch himself a mere fortune-hunter, and so, he took refuge in an ominous and expectant silence. “I will get hold of her estate, and then curb her extravagance,” he brooded.

His worst fears as to the “underground railroad” communications of the “uncle” and ward were realized when he finally received a positive request of Senator Garston for an immediate return.

“I want you at once. I wish to lay out our plans for the winter. And if I am to trap this underhanded, intrigant Mrs. Willoughby, I must finish my work before the opening of the session of Congress, and our committees will begin soon to meet. Come on, with no delay.” The words were almost mandatory, and they annoyed him strangely.

Returning from his banker’s with this letter, he found his wife’s two maids busied in packing up all her effects. He was startled, but took the defensive.

“Let me know their probable amount,” gruffly answered the husband, as he departed for the steamer office. He was beginning to feel a master hand now.

“She had the news before I received it,” he growled. “And I swear I will make it my pleasing duty to bring ‘Uncle James’ to book, on my return. I will get her property into my hands, and control it.

“She would beggar even a Vanderbilt, an Astor or a Goelet, if given a free hand.” Vreeland aspired to the conquest of this defiant beauty in rebellion.

It so happened that the game as laid out by “Uncle James” suited all three; but, while he thirsted to see Justine Duprez once more and to confer with Doctor Alberg, Vreeland was really anxious at heart to re-enter the comparative protection of his Wall Street office.

“By Jove! I am at least between the lines there,” he mused. “I can frighten both sides, and so, guard myself.”

It was on the Gascogne that he watched Katharine VanDyke Norreys as the Count de Millefleurs (a young attaché going over on his first appointment) bent over her steamer chair.

“This marriage has only hung a millstone around my neck,” he resentfully brooded. “And I wonder if I was only brought in to relieve ‘Uncle James.’” It was a mean suspicion, but it clung closely to him.

There were times when he feared for the safety of the document so deftly hidden away. The copy had been artfully deposited (under receipt) in a Belgian branch bank in Paris, under an assumed name, and the banker’s receipt was now sewed in his waistcoat. “Thank God! That is all safe!” he sighed.

He little reflected that one day, laughing over the “Agony Column” of the London Times, his eye had paused at the name “Martha Wilmot.” Some trace of familiarity, some fleeting memory caused him to read the few lines.

“Handsome reward and the most complete immunity guaranteed. Greatly to your advantage. Communicate in any way.”

The signature, “New York,” followed by an address, closed the expensively placed announcement.

“Some relic of man’s folly and woman’s frailty!” he laughed. “The old, old game goes on forever.”

And yet, he little dreamed that Hugh Conyers and handsome Dan Daly were now the right and left hand men of Judge Hiram Endicott, who was engaged in some very interesting metropolitan researches.

In far-away New York, there was the veiled duel of two fearless intellects going on, even in the summer days, when the town was empty.

Mrs. Elaine Willoughby was again the radiant mistress of Lakemere, although she spent a portion of her time in town at the Circassia.

There was now a strange glow of happiness shining on the splendid woman’s face, and the services of Doctor Hugo Alberg were permanently discontinued.

And, in a roundabout way he had also learned that Judge Endicott and his nephew made up the whole social circle at Lakemere, with Hugh Conyers as a permanent summer guest.

Hugo Alberg had sworn an oath that Harold Vreeland should recoup him for the loss of his star patient. He now only awaited the return of his proposed victim “to levy the Rhine dues.”

A visit to the South Fifth Avenue rooms where Justine had vicariously entertained him in the old days, gave him the news, by the mouth of the old denizen, that “la pauvre Justine” was tied down at Lakemere.

“Some one have robbed ze lady last year, and now Justine is ze prissonaire to watch ze garderobe all ze while; and only ze travail and ze solitude! V’la tout! Pauvre Justine! Elle vent bien partir pour la France.” The doctor hungrily awaited Vreeland’s return for a bleeding process.

No one but the Frenchwoman herself knew how tightly the coils were wound around her. Shaking in fear, left without the secret protection of her traitorous tempter, Vreeland, she dared not try to break away from Lakemere, for she now feared the gleaming wrist-irons.

To run away would be only to invite an instant arrest, and she panted for the time of the winter’s gaieties. She would have a chance perhaps then to slip away unknown.

“Ah! he shall pay,” she muttered, as her velvety eyes rested, lit up with a strange fire, on the beautiful woman whose iron hand now held her so firmly. “She and the Kelly—how I could drive a knife into their hearts!” she hissed.

“But Justine must wait; gold first, gold—and then la liberté shall be mine.”

When “Harold Vreeland and wife” were duly domiciled at the Hotel Savoy, he was not astonished at the proximity of “Uncle James” at the Plaza Hotel; but, even on the pier, when the Senator met them, Vreeland noted the ravages of some overmastering passion in the strong man’s face.

The eyes were brilliant and unsteady, there was a foreign irritability in his abrupt manner, and Vreeland’s attempts at a tête-à-tête were only met with a sharp command “to get inside his old business lines” as soon as he could; and Vreeland, humbled, kept his temper.

“I must have you back in the traces again,” sharply cried Garston. “And, I would get up to Lakemere to-night if I were you. See Mrs. Willoughby, and get safe on the old basis.

“The stock market is humming, and I will soon have need of you in Wall Street. I trust no one there but you.”

“You will go, of course, up to Lakemere to-night?” said Noel Endicott. “I have already telegraphed your arrival to Mrs. Willoughby.”

In a stolen detour, Vreeland arranged for an early morning interview with Doctor Alberg, and then he passed the “Circassia” on his way to the train after dinner.

The flat demand of janitor Helms for “backsheesh” keenly angered a man already enraged by “Uncle James’” quiet appropriation of the first evening with that hawk-eyed free-lance of marital beauty, Mrs. Katharine Vreeland, “whose remarkable loveliness had created such a London and Paris sensation.”

“I will soon cut the Gordian knot between these two,” growled Vreeland, as he descended from the waiting carriage at Lakemere. “I will either have my wife and her property to myself, or else ‘Uncle James’ will show his hand, to the very last card.” He was beginning to be reckless in a blind jealousy.

The welcome of Mrs. Elaine Willoughby to her returned protégé was merely a complacently cordial one, and yet, in half an hour, Vreeland bore away the assurance of lulled suspicions and his continued business relation.

“I shall soon call upon Mrs. Vreeland and assure myself by inspection of her married happiness,” was the last greeting of the hostess, whose other guests, if any, were invisible.

“I will send for you to the ‘Circassia’ next week, and give you my general directions for some business which is impending.”

A flitting form in the dusky garden walks led him toward the “lovers’ labyrinth,” behind the unforgotten summer house. His one friend was on watch.

“Justine!” he gasped, and he hastened to stealthily join her in the deepened gloom of the trees. A new fear smote upon his startled nerves.

There was the velvet-eyed Frenchwoman in waiting, and her passionate words, her panting breast and gleaming eyes told him of an unbroken tie, the bond of their guilty past.

The startled woman fled away at the sound of distant voices, while Vreeland, wildly agitated at heart, hastened to his carriage.

“The enemy are on their lines,” he defiantly said. “I must strike a blow somewhere, for Elaine Willoughby’s vengeance is not dead, but sleepeth. She has not been deceived.

“And, Justine is a virtual prisoner. If she were to tell all!” He stopped short, for his heart bounded in agony. “I must remove that document,” he muttered. “For, even she may become an enemy.” He had always distrusted all men and his marital experience led him now to distrust all women—even Justine.

As he dashed down the road to the railway station, Vreeland noted an athletic lad easily following the springing horses, mounted on a racing bicycle.

But, officer Dan Daly smiled victoriously next day when he heard Mary Kelly’s brother tell of Vreeland’s brief tryst with Justine, and his long interview with Doctor Alberg in South Fifth Avenue. “I’ll get him yet, in the very act,” he cheerfully prophesied, “with that stolen paper in his hand.”

“The trap is nearly ready to spring,” complacently reflected the Roundsman, as he ordered a night and day watch at the peep-hole which controlled the interior of Justine Duprez’s rooms.

“I have sworn not to marry Mary Kelly till I’ve put the ornaments on that rascal.” He glanced lovingly at a pair of spring-steel handcuffs of his own especial selection. His fancy jewelry!

The days gliding along rapidly as Harold Vreeland dropped into his old groove of the “automatic business relations” in Wall Street found him still the victim of adverse currents, and wavering in the blasts of contrary-blowing winds. He made no headway toward a solid footing.

Socially, the return of the Vreelands was an event of moment, and the tide of unrestrained gaiety rose high around the now frankly defiant wife. There were soon those gay cavaliers, Merriman, Wiltshire and Rutherstone, in attendance, “the Three Guardsmen” of the defiant young Western queen.

And the ever amiable Mrs. Volney McMorris and a flock of semi-detached women of the younger married set gathered to the feast.

In the hotel corridors of the Savoy, the curious shaven servitors often listened to the sounds of vigorous marital debate, wherein the low growl of Vreeland followed the strident soprano of Mrs. Katharine.

For, “Uncle James” had not yet been brought to book! And the young husband was brutally sullen.

There had been several bitter exchanges of hidden menaces between the two men at the Hotel Plaza. “I am fighting the fight of my life, Vreeland, now, over some great Western properties,” gruffly answered Senator Garston.

“I’ve no time now to go into Katharine’s affairs. Ask her; she will tell you that all is right.

“And I am, besides, carrying on a half-arm, in-fighting duel with that devil of a woman.

“I need you in your place to keep her quiet, and whether you wish to or not, you shall wait. That’s all.” The iron fist of the statesman made the glasses ring in an angry emphasis.

“You had better watch over your wife and keep her friendly with Mrs. Willoughby than try to budge me. I need both your help now, and, I propose to have it,” was Garston’s last shot, as he strode away. Certainly “Uncle James” did not mince matters.

And as the days drifted on, Vreeland became an object of remark, even in the hurry of Wall Street. His wife seemed to be on terms of a frank social intimacy with the Lady of Lakemere, but the man whom all had envied was rapidly becoming a profitable habitué of the Café Savarin. It was the beginning of the end of the “splendid run of luck.”

Both of these secret agents marveled, in their different interviews, when the Queen of the Street answered the mute inquiries of their eyes:

“Just let him go on; do nothing whatever to interrupt him. Only report all to me.” And onward dashed Vreeland toward unknown reefs of woe.

She knew, too, that a haggard-eyed man often stole over the walls of Lakemere, like a thief in the night, now, to meet Justine Duprez, who was just beginning in her own cowardly heart, to wonder whether a frank confession might not save her.

For there were no “sure tips” now to aid Harold Vreeland’s redoubled plunging, and the “strong spirit of wine” was burning away the brain of the man whose once handsome face was now distorted with racking emotions and bloated by cognac. He was on a steep “down grade.”

“He may kill me!” tremblingly whispered Justine, who secretly counted up her gains safely stored away in Paris. “I might tell them all, and then go away over there. Dare I speak?”

She began to watch, with a sinking heart, the clear, unflinching eyes of her mistress, now glowing in all the awakened love of her satisfied motherhood.

“Not yet, not yet, only at the very last!” was the cowardly woman’s decision, as she crept to the safety of her room. The French maid’s cowardly terror escaped not her mistress’ eyes.

But the downward curve was now slippery under Harold Vreeland’s uneasy feet. He had thrown off all his retentive watchfulness, and he even roughly repulsed Doctor Alberg and Janitor Helms, who hounded him to the apartments at the Elmleaf, where the suave Bagley still welcomed his unhappy master.

Brooding there at night after the double life of his Wall Street duties, and his private plunging, Harold Vreeland at last formulated a direct demand upon Senator Garston for money. He stood now on the brink of personal ruin.

The market had gone sadly against him. Loss on loss had swept away the great sum which he had received as a bribe, and his wife’s recurrent extravagance at last led him to draw the fifteen thousand dollars of his salary for the current year.

Noel Endicott handed over the check without a word, and the fact was soon the property of Roundsman Daly. “I’ll gather him in when that money is gone,” chuckled Daly. “He is near to the end of his rope now.”

“I can see the white hand that is throttling him!” muttered the blunt policeman. “It’s the mistress. She will soon bring him to his knees, and maybe there’ll be no work left for me to do,” he said with a professional sigh of regret. For, he had set his heart on “running Vreeland in.” “I’ll have him, dead or alive, yet,” the policeman swore.

“I gave you enough money for four years at least. You have your own income down there; what the devil have you done with it?”

The haggard man murmured complaints of his wife’s extravagance. There was his whole line of privately held stocks in danger now, and the market was faltering. The Senator read the truth in his eyes.

“See here, Vreeland!” angrily shouted Garston. “You’ve been drinking far too much of late. I will see that your wife has money—for herself, but not for you. I hear that you are deep in outside speculations. If so, remember the old remark about a fool and his money.”

Harold Vreeland turned without a word and left his secret enemy, now his master. “If I only dared to use the secret of the document!” he raged, as he sought the hospitality of valet Bagley at the Elmleaf.

There were days now when he did not go to the office where the business of “Wyman & Vreeland” hummed merrily along.

Days, too, when he did not return to Mrs. Katharine Vreeland’s informal court at the Hotel Savoy.

“If I only dared!” he growled. But then he reflected that any use of the document would probably “land him behind the bars.”

He dissembled his rage, as he returned late that night to the separate apartments he now used at the Savoy.

In the hall, as he lay in a wakeful unrest, he heard two servants chattering. “The old Senator is here all the while; I guess he is the real head of the family.”

He arose and sought the brandy bottle with uncertain steps. For he realized at last that whatever game the Senator and his wife were playing, he was counted only a mere pawn. And, the game of Life was going against him now!

His power had departed from him, and before he showed his distorted face next day on Wall Street his line of private stocks was sold out “under the rule,” and he was really a beggar—stripped of all his ill-gotten gains, when he returned that night to face his wife, who, richly dressed for an evening’s outing, passed by him with a silent sneer. Truly a marriage à la mode. He was at bay now!

Vreeland turned into his own room with a muttered curse, and after a vicious pull at the brandy bottle, rushed out upon the streets to wander aimlessly in the throngs of the night.

For he was chased out by the maddening thoughts brought to his half-crazed mind by a chance glance at the Evening Journal.

“A social note” of interest heralded the fact that “Mr. and Mrs. James Potter had returned from Europe, and that the hospitable VanSittart mansion on Fifth Avenue would soon be opened to society once more, as well as the beautiful old colonial manor house of Oakhurst. This union of two old families has united hearts as well as millions,” etc.

On this sharp evening of early October, Senator-elect James Garston sat alone, moodily gazing into the cheerful wood fire in his sumptuous room at the Plaza. He watched the bright blaze for an hour, until the hickory billets had turned into white ashes, flaking the tiles at his feet.

On the table at his side lay an unfinished letter, and by the dying embers the man who had the world at his feet groaned. “Ashes of life! The ashes of a dead past.”

For, by the side of his last passionate appeal lay one or two tattered letters traced in a girlish hand.

Garston walked the floor with a strong, resounding tread, as he went over every detail of the veiled duel of the last months.

In the glass at either end of the room he saw his own strong, resolute face, the silvered temples framed in iron-gray hair, his brow furrowed with the lines of care which neither his honors nor his millions could efface.

On the table lay his watch, pocketbook and revolver. He paused, and picked up the heavy Smith & Wesson aimlessly. The man who had faced death in a hundred forms bitterly smiled as the trigger yielded to his practiced finger. There, he held ready fate in his hand!

“Here is either vengeance or release,” he gloomily muttered. “If we were to go together.”

And then his face softened. “Not yet! Not yet!” he murmured. “I shall live to look upon my child’s face.”

Ignorant of his wife’s secret warfare with Harold Vreeland, Senator Garston saw in all these precautions only the confirmation of her stern sentence of banishment from her presence.

He knew, too, now of the practical victory of her trip around the world. Elaine Willoughby had made her word good. The missing girl had simply disappeared! And he had been unable to reach the girl in order to blacken the mother. He was powerless now. All his craft, backed by money, had been met and vanquished.

When he had paid off all his detectives in a sullen despair, the Chief of the “Inquiry Bureau” had admiringly remarked: “Your enemy has certainly handled herself superbly, Senator.”

“Force is of no use. She has been guided by some matchless intellect. We easily traced the girl over to Dresden.

“There she became an inmate of a private Klinik, which, bowered in gardens and surrounded with stone walls, is guarded like the Kaiser’s palace.

“The girl went into the Klinik and never emerged; that is our final report. You know what your orders were—no scandal, no publicity. We tried to get an agent into the establishment. Ah! Useless! It is a close corporation.”

The Senator on this lonely night was happy that he had only divulged to his agents his desire to find the girl for reasons of an old, bitter intrigue about her property interests.

Too well he knew that Margaret Cranstoun’s clear voice, if once lifted to tell the story of his past, would damn him forever. The toga would then be but a public badge of shame. And so, fear stayed his strong hand.

And a hundred vain solutions of the enigma had haunted his fancy, for he himself felt assured that the women had met in Europe, and that his daughter was now lost to him forever.

He groaned as he pondered over the sweet face smiling up from the dearly bought picture. His sentence of a living death weighed heavily upon him now. The daughter whom he yearned for would perhaps never call him “Father!”

The wretched man little knew how ably Roper had fulfilled his trust as personal guard, how wisely Sara Conyers had concerted her measures.

Secretly smuggled away at night from the Dresden Klinik, Romaine Garland had been transported to Copenhagen in a private car, and, on beautiful Lake Malar, near stately Stockholm, an old chateau, now a secluded sanitarium, had given its welcome shelter to the three travelers. Judge Endicott’s all-seeing eye followed their every movement, and Roper had nobly upheld his trust.

The heart-hungry mother, hastening from Port Said to Odessa, and thence to St. Petersburg, had crossed the Baltic to Stockholm, and then, while the baffled detectives were still watching in Dresden, had clasped to her heart the girl whom the lame secretary’s chance affection had given back to her.

And what a delicious apprenticeship in motherhood was opened to the loving woman! A fairy heaven!

There, by the blue waves of Lake Malar, the mother learned of Alva Whiting’s peaceful girlhood days in western New York. How those who had given her a home had died leaving her their honest name and a legacy of love in the technical education which had fitted her to gain a living. And then, came the ordeal! The pathway of a maidenly Una among the lions and jackals of Greater New York City.

The dark shadows which rested on the heart of the repentant husband threw their gloomy shade now over the heart-happy mother. For the same fear possessed them both. The old fear! That puerile fear—and yet, the most potent: What will the world say? Garston feared the black record of his cowardly abandonment, and the victorious mother found that, though innocent, she dared not tell the whole truth.

Innocent at heart, realizing the only means to save her child from the man whom she secretly feared, when Elaine Willoughby went back, incognito, to reappear at Vienna on her homeward way, she only caught her loving child to her breast in a torrent of silent tears, when Romaine Garland murmured: “You never speak of my father!”

“Do not ask me yet, my darling!” she sobbed. “I want you all to myself now. Ask me nothing yet.”

And though the Lady of Lakemere had hoodwinked all of Garston’s spies, though she had returned unanswered, the letters from her husband sent to her by messenger on her return, and held the secret of his guilty past over his head, she felt that this armed inactivity could not continue forever. The battle must be fought out, and either lost or won. She renewed her courage.

She could not lie to her child, and her eyes had dropped before the appealing glances of the restored one. A hundred varied plans were considered on that long ocean return voyage.

The secret hidden in the stolen document was momentous! She could not abandon her comrades in their speculations without vindicating her trust in honor.

An option, under the guarantee of her faithful syndicate friends to allow “certain persons” to purchase “certain stocks” at a fixed valuation was in that fateful record. Its loss meant the ruin of many reputations. Perhaps, too, the crash of vast fortunes.

The betrayal of a trust which Alynton had imposed upon her, and for which she had been selected by the “secret syndicate”—the gods of local finance! She must leave the secret circle with clean hands.

So far, she was safe!

As yet, the thief had not dared to use it. Its fatal power was still veiled from her dearest foe, James Garston, the husband of her youthful flower, whom all men once honored as Arnold Cranstoun.

“My God!” shuddered Elaine. “If Garston should obtain that document it would be my ruin. All would believe that I had sold their secrets to others. I would be at his mercy. It must not be.

“If he—Vreeland—can be trapped, if a silent surrender is safely effected, then I could give up my trust, leave America, and seek happiness abroad with Romaine, my beautiful darling.”

And if Vreeland was the thief, he could sell her to shame in all men’s eyes if Garston would shield him.

She knew further that there was no mercy in Garston’s love-maddened heart now!

And a bitter thought haunted her over the dark Atlantic waters. “My child’s future! She can not marry under the suspicion of illegitimate birth, and she shall never deem her mother to have been a guilty wanton.”

Even Judge Endicott and the chivalric Hugh Conyers knew but half the truth. Both had assumed that there had been an early and unhappy marriage, and both only believed that Elaine Willoughby was merely fighting for the custody of a child whom they knew not to be of legal age.

“If they knew more, I would either have to clear myself by the whole truth, or else be disgraced in their eyes,” she murmured.

And on the instant call of her New York agents she had returned now to strike a death blow to all Harold Vreeland’s criminal schemes. But she was so sadly weak in her own defenses, against the laws of nature, of God’s holy sacrament of marriage, and the pleading eyes of her innocent child! And yet Vreeland’s demoralization forced desperate measures upon her now. If he should die or abscond, then, there was ruin to face.

“I can tell Romaine all when she is my very own, and she shall choose between us then, and judge us both.

“She alone has the right to the truth.”

This vow upon her knees had quieted Margaret Cranstoun’s heart, for she only now awaited Roundsman Dan Daly’s coming triumph to summon Senator Alynton.

Once the document was honorably out of her hands, then the Queen of the Street could abdicate, and go “far from the madding crowd,” where “beyond their voices there is peace.” The hour of loathing her excited environment had come at last.

It seemed as if some subtle commune of spirit had brought the long-estranged husband and wife together in spirit on this very evening, for Margaret Cranstoun dreamed of the loyal husband of her youth, when she fell asleep, murmuring “Lead, kindly Light.” There were angels pleading with them both—angels of white, unfolded wings. For the child’s sake, they pleaded for a hearing.

And the next morning she was shaken at heart, as the gusty pines are thrilled by the wild winds of night, when she read the long appeal wrung from Arnold Cranstoun’s heart by the hours of his lonely midnight agony. His agony had overmastered the proud spirit at last.

He knew that there would be an answer, for his messenger was bidden to return.

And all that day, James Garston waited, while his estranged wife trembled at the voice of her own heart, and bowed her head over her daughter’s picture in an agony of speechless love. She dared all for herself, but only to save the child of her hungry heart.

She feared the fatal sentence of these awful words of Holy Writ: “For the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the heads of the children.” That thought brought her to her knees now, and she walked alone in the dark valley of silent sorrows.

Brought to bay by the wild appeal, the excited woman realized that she dare not confer with either Alynton, Endicott or Conyers. The still unsoiled woman-heart revolted at the unveiling of all the sorrows of a shadowed life—those secret sorrows which had haunted her in all the gilded scenes of a strange prosperity, her burden carried under the veil of secrecy—her galling chain of secret sorrows.

“For the child’s sake!” she murmured, as she vainly essayed to answer her recreant husband’s proposals.

A dozen times she had read over his last logical conclusion: “If you and I are to respect the untroubled heart of the innocent child whom I have never seen, then we must leave it to her alone to decide in the future as to whether she shall go on through life as a fatherless girl.

Elaine Willoughby recognized at once his coldly practical mind in the propositions.

“For all our sakes,” he pleaded, “I will die to the world as Arnold Cranstoun, if you agree; and I swear before God, that if you agree that I will only approach Romaine Garland as a stranger, unless in later years you may lift the ban. For never lived man or woman who could foretell the future workings of the chainless human heart. Let us make some joint provision for her future safety. In God’s name—for the child’s sake.” His words echoed in her heart, and not in vain.

A meeting at the Hotel Belgravia in a week’s time was the proposal.

A family friend of Senator Garston’s had placed his apartments at the husband’s disposal. “We are neither of us known there; you can previously enter the hotel and observe the rooms.

“In the evening at nine o’clock on the day you select, I will be at the door, and you can close the sorrows of a whole life, in a half-hour given up to mercy.”

“For the child’s sake, be it so!” she cried as she read over the proposal once more.

Her task was to bring every letter and relic of their married days and to witness their destruction.

“Then our child can never be shadowed by my guilty past,” his hand had traced.

“I am to give you the receipt of the International Trust Company for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars of United States bonds, registered in the name of Romaine Garland.

“And I am to leave her in my will one-half of all my property. There is then to be silence—oblivion; for me repentance, for you peace, and so, for her in time, the enjoyment of her own.

“Should she learn from you in later years that James Garston was her father, there will at least be no cloud upon her name, and I leave the key of the future in your hands.

“This I would guarantee before either of the three men whom you trust; but, I implore peace and silence, for the child’s sake.

“Our only guarantee in this interview of good faith is the one unbroken tie between us, the child whom I have never seen.”

It was late in the day when James Garston read the lines traced by the hand which had once trembled lovingly in his own.

“I will come! I will trust to you once more, under the protection of the memories of all my sorrows, but only for the child’s sake. Our past is dead. Let us place the seal of silence upon its tomb. I will do as you bid me.”

“Come into the writing-room,” said the Senator, after he had heard an appeal which caused him to fear that the man’s mind was wavering.

“Remember, sir,” sternly said the Western millionaire, “I know where the money is going. And it is the very last dollar of mine that you will ever see. Your wife”—Garston stopped, shamefaced, for the shadow of a darling sin now rose up between him and the new-born hope of meeting his own child in the coming years.

The spell of Margaret Cranstoun was strong upon him now. “I can atone; Katharine shall not live to suffer poverty,” he groaned, as Vreeland sped away with a check for forty thousand dollars. And so, a manly throb of remorse made him generous to Katharine Norreys’ hoodwinked husband.

The rain was falling in torrents when the hooded form of a stately woman descended at the Hotel Belgravia on a storm-darkened night a week later. The drenched cabman wondered at the hurried liberality of his fare, and then hastened away far beyond the row of blinking lights.

Up the stairway to the first story, the visitor sped with no uncertain foot, the “parlor watch” noticing with surprise the white robes beneath the lady’s shrouding cloakings. For it was a fearful night without; those festal robes were but a mockery in the storm-lashed darkness.

“One of our regulars caught out in this squall,” sleepily muttered the waiter, resuming his novel.

The door was quickly closed, and there, surrounded by all the belongings of a happy family circle, the long sundered foes met in silence before a cheerful fire which blazed upon the hearth.

In James Garston’s startled eyes there was an expression of wondering mystery. For with a woman’s self-protective instinct, his estranged wife had eluded her household at the “Circassia,” and stolen away from the dinner circle, robed in a costume of stainless white.

Down the deserted side stairway, she had fled, swathed in secretly purchased storm wrappings such as a woman of the people might wear. And now, she looked strangely young and fair as he sprang toward her. She had not been recognized by the hotel attaches; no one had seen her leave the “Circassia.”

And neither Justine, the watchful, nor the amanuensis knew—not even the butler detective—that their mistress had gone forth in the storm, her own apartment doors being locked. She had victoriously passed all the dangers which she feared. A wild haste now possessed her; only to be safe at home again!

In silence Elaine Willoughby placed a bundle upon the table, and then, the eyes of the unhappy couple met.

“It is all there—everything,” faltered Margaret Cranstoun. “Hasten, for I must save myself; I can not linger. This visit must be kept a secret from all, for the child’s sake. Examine and destroy them!”

The flames merrily leaped up, and without the wild storm lashed the window-panes. In a few moments, the work of destruction was complete.

Margaret Cranstoun started back as her husband faced her, for some overmastering emotion now quickly convulsed his strong face. A strange fear palsied her tongue. She had never seen that ashen look upon his strong face in life before.

“There is the Trust Company’s receipt,” he said, speaking as if in a dream, while his eyes roved over her loveliness, as she stood there with her trembling hands clasped on her heaving bosom. A woman to draw men to her feet—a throbbing, passionate, love-haunted queen—the apotheosis of love!

“Do you agree to my proposition about my will?” the Senator slowly said; “and I may at some future day hope to see—”

He paused abruptly, for Margaret Cranstoun reeled. Her strength was failing; there were strange shadows in the room; the fitful fire glared in weird flashes!

“Let me go! Let me go!” she cried. “You can write to me as before.”

“I must go!”

For there were strange shadows gathering on his convulsed face.

She turned as if to flee. Her husband was too quick for her.

With a single bound he reached the door and locked it.

“Margaret!” he wildly cried, as he crushed her to his breast, “the past is dead. Its record lies there, ashes to ashes—the ashes of a dead life!

“No one would know. If we were married now, in due form, the silence of the past would be unbroken. It is my last prayer. Forgive!”

The frightened woman was struggling in his relentless grasp, as he pleaded “for the child’s sake!”

She made one last despairing effort to break his frenzied hold upon her, but she stood there helpless and transfixed in horror, as his arms relaxed and he suddenly sank at her feet, lying there prone upon the tapestried floor. The Dark Angel’s wings had touched his pallid brow.

The shriek of horror was frozen on her lips by a sudden fear, and then grasping at her draperies, she fled away through the open door of the next apartment. She dared not glance behind her, for death was there!

Now, between her and that locked door lay the nameless thing which was but now a strong man, the peer of kings! The despairing lover who had died with the last frenzied words of reawakened tenderness upon his lips! The husband of her youth!

The majesty of Death had entered unannounced, and that night, in far-away Sweden, Romaine Garland, praying for the mother whom she had recovered from Shadowland, stirred in the sleep of maidenhood to murmur, “My father!” For in the vast empyrean James Garston had found his child—at last!

A glance showed to the entrapped woman a stout partition wall leading from a window opened into a side court to the long hotel corridor on the other side.

There was no one in the silent corridor. Her beating heart told her that here was safety.

It was but the work of a moment to cast her cloak around her, and a side entrance offered her an unobserved descent to the level of the street.

“If that door should be locked!” was her heart’s wild alarm.

But no, it yielded, and then with a swift step she sped along in the storm, not daring to look behind her in the night!

The rains of heaven had cooled her brow as she halted far away before a row of carriages standing before a theater. The sleepy driver only growled “All right,” as he heard the words “Central Park West.”

He never knew that the half-fainting woman who stopped him on a corner twenty minutes later, was the one possessor of a mystery which was the sensation of the whole city next morning.

“Women are queer creatures!” babbled the sleepy driver, as he sought the nearest saloon, while his fare disappeared under the gloomy darkness of the walls of the “Circassia.”

“Now what business could take a decent woman out a night like this?” But he had substantial cause for rejoicing, and he blessed her on her way. For she paid him the price of a life—all unknown to his gratified cupidity.

An hour later there was hurrying to and fro in her household. “It is one of Madame’s old attacks,” Justine explained to Doctor Anderson, hastily summoned by the private secretary.

For after instinctively hiding away the document thrust into her bosom, the paper which gave to fatherless Romaine Garland a fortune, Elaine Willoughby had fainted away, with her hand upon the bell, as she mechanically summoned help in the hour of her agony. And the price of her safety was a near approach to the grave!

On the next morning the journals of fifty cities told millions of readers of the sudden death of the Western magnate, Senator James Garston, and the various political cabals were busied with selecting his successor. Death had robbed him of the civic crown, and a stately head was lying low.

Senator Alynton, while hurrying from Washington to New York on business, read all the details of the attack of heart failure which had cut off the strong man in the flower of his life.

“This is a serious business,” he murmured, but his impassive face never showed his secret solicitude lest the papers of the dead man might expose the operations of a syndicate “for revenue only.” He wore the impassive mask of the millionaire politician.

There was the look of a wild despair in Katharine Vreeland’s eyes when she awakened her heavy-eyed husband from the sleep of exhaustion the next morning.

“Get up!” she sternly said.

“Good God! We are ruined!” cried Vreeland.

“For all your fortune was in his hands. You have not a scrap of paper to show for it.”

“What do I care for the money!” she sobbed. “I am alone in the world now.”