"If she should betray me, and women are women, after all," he mused in his cowardly ferocity.
"If she pulls this off for me, I'll"-- he ceased, with an inward shudder, for he dared not give the awful thought its fitting frame.
"Only at the last," he murmured, as he sped along in Brooklyn's dingy water streets to take on another mask to veil his wolfishly evil life.
While snares and pitfalls were being laid for Randall Clayton's careless feet, that gentleman sat in a wrathful mood, pondering over Arthur Ferris' half-hearted disclosures.

Clayton's face had frankly disclosed his displeasure at the false attitude of his chum, when Ferris reluctantly disclosed the fact of the secret financial espionage.
The three years of their past intimacy now took on a different color, at once, to the jaundiced eyes of the young cashier.
He had almost abruptly declined Ferris' invitation to spend Sunday at Seneca Lake, with the prosperous lawyer's mother and two sisters.
A feeling of bitter envy gnawed at Clayton's heart as he counted up the rapid rise of his quondam friend.
"So, he has been playing this double game for years; it must have been at Worthington's bidding.

And why ?" It began to dawn at last upon Clayton that his Detroit patron had certainly followed a singular course in his apparent beneficence.
All unused to social intrigue, Clayton ignored the possible effect of his further presence in Worthington's household as an attractive young man when little Alice, at a bound, passed through the gates of girlhood and became the beautiful Miss Worthington.

He had never seen the angel at his side, and yet Ferris, clearer eyed, had conquered in silent craft a golden future.
Clayton lingered at his table in the Grand Union cafe long after the waiter had removed his half-tasted dinner.

He ordered an unaccustomed "highball" as he pondered over some means of circumventing the social treason of his dethroned "friend." Clayton easily found a valid reason, for the semi-treason of Ferris.
"He is, after all, a stranger to me.