He felt the clouding spell of some mysterious enmity descending upon them, and clouding their love as he kissed the white and trembling hands which had so nervously clasped his own.
For Irma Gluyas feared for her own life.

She dared not betray the tiger-like Fritz Braun, whose veiled scheme of plunder or blackmail she could not fathom.
Hitherto all had gone well with them, in their merry will-o'-the-wisp game with Irma's jealous unknown guardians, with his concealed enemies.
But Clayton well knew that no mere pretense would baffle Arthur Ferris' thorough knowledge of all of his past social habits.
He dared not openly quarrel with Ferris until Jack Witherspoon's return.

He only lived now to see the Detroit lawyer speeding west, far on ahead of the deceitful Ferris, who would be detained in New York by the quiet consummation of the big deal.
Clayton was but too well aware that his only weapon was his knowledge of Ferris' secret marriage--an outrage upon Alice Worthington's unguarded girlhood.
And yet he dared not openly use that weapon; how easy for the old capitalist to frame a suave excuse for the "maimed rites" of that Western bridal.
One longing burned now in Clayton's heart, the honest wish to find some dignified and safe place of meeting with the woman upon whom he would shower the gold soon to be his own.
"If anything should happen," he thought.
Of course, his own face was too well known to adopt any mere hiding tactics.

Irma was ever fearful of her jealous artist guardians, and in this lovely evening hour the lover's heart rose up in all its stormy tenderness to beg her to lift the veil from her incognito.
Even while they murmured again their vows and drifted away into dreams of the unclouded future, the heavens were blackening around them.
Irma seemed strangely frightened as she cowered in her lover's arms, while he begged her to lift the veil of her privacy.
"I must be with you--near you," he cried.

"Listen! I have even now grave matters hanging over me which may summon me suddenly away from you.