erpoel, "first because you love
the things--and next because of Timson."

CHAPTER XXII

ONE OF MR. VANDERPOEL'S LETTERS

Mr. Germen, the secretary of the great Mr. Vanderpoel, in arranging
the neat stacks of letters preparatory to his chief's entrance to
his private room each morning, knowing where each should be placed,
understood that such as were addressed in Miss Vanderpoel's hand would
be read before anything else. This had been the case even when she had
just been placed in a French school, a tall, slim little girl, with
immense demanding eyes, and a thick black plait of hair swinging between
her straight, rather thin, shoulders. Between other financial potentates
and their little girls, Mr. Germen knew that the oddly confidential
relation which existed between these two was unusual. Her schoolgirl
letters, it had been understood, should be given the first place on
the stacks of envelopes each incoming ocean steamer brought in its mail
bags. Since the beginning of her visit to her sister, Lady Anstruthers,
the exact dates of mail steamers seemed to be of increased importance.
Miss Vanderpoel evidently found much to write about. Each steamer
brought a full-looking envelope to be placed in a prominent position.

On a hot morning in the early summer Mr. Germen found two or three--two
of them of larger size and seeming to contain business papers. These
he placed where they would be seen at once. Mr. Vanderpoel was a little
later than usual in his arrival. At this season he came from his place
in the country, and before leaving it this morning he had been talking
to his wife, whom he found rather disturbed by a chance encounter with
a young woman who had returned to visit her mother after a year spent in
England with her English husband. This young woman, now Lady Bowen, once
Milly Jones, had been one of the amusing marvels of New York. A girl
neither rich nor so endowed by nature as to be able to press upon the
world any special claim to consideration as a beauty, her enterprise,
and the daring of her tactics, had been the delight of many a satiric
onlooker. In her schooldays she had ingenuously mapped out her future
career. Other American girls married men with titles, and she intended
to do the same thing. The other little girls laughed, but they liked to
hear her talk. All information regarding such unions as was to be
found in the newspapers and magazines, she collected and studiously
read--sometimes aloud