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A negro at the little cubby hole of an office pushed out a register at them. Constance signed the first names that came into her head, and a moment later they were on their way up to a big double room on the third floor, led by another, younger negro.

“Will you send the bell-boy up?” asked Constance as they entered the room.

“I’m the bell-boy ma’am,” was his disconcerting reply.

“I mean the other one,” replied Constance, hazarding, “the one who is here in the day time.”

“There ain’t no other boy, ma’am. There ain’t no–“

“Could you deliver a note for me at a tea room in New York to- morrow?” interrupted Constance, striking while the iron seemed hot.

The boy turned around abruptly from his busy occupation of doing something useless that would elicit a tip. He quietly shut the door, and wheeled about with his hand still on the knob.

“Do you want to know what room she’s in?” he asked.

Constance opened her handbag. Mrs. Palmer suppressed a little scream. She had expected that ivory-handled thing to appear. Instead there was a treasury note of a size that caused the white part of the boy’s eyes to expand beyond all the laws of optics.

“Yes,” she said, pressing it into his hand.

“Forty-two-down the hall, around the turn, on the other side,” whispered the boy. “And for God’s sake, ma’am, don’t tell nobody I told you.”

His shuffle down the hall had scarcely ceased before the two women were stealthily creeping in the opposite direction, looking eagerly at the numbers.

Constance had stopped abruptly around the turn. Through a transom of one of the rooms they could hear voices but could see no light.

“Well, go back then,” growled a gruff voice. “Your family will never believe your story, never believe that you came again and stayed at Lustgarten’s against your will. Why,” the voice taunted with a harsh laugh, “if they knew the truth, they would turn you from the door, instead of offering a reward.”

There was a moment of silence. Then a woman’s voice, strangely familiar to Constance, spoke.

“The truth!” she exclaimed bitterly. “He knew it was a case of a girl who liked a good time, liked pretty clothes, a ride in an automobile, theaters, excitement, bright lights, night life–a girl with a romantic disposition in whom all that was repressed at home. He knew it,” she repeated, raising the tone to an almost hysterical pitch, “led me on, made me love him because he could give them all to me. And when I began to show the strain of the pace-they all show it more than the men–he cast me aside like a squeezed-out lemon.”

As she listened, Constance understood it all now. It was to make Florence Gibbons a piece of property, a thing to be traded in, bartered–that was the idea. Discover her–yes; but first to thrust her into the life if she would not go into it herself–anything to discredit her testimony beforehand, anything to save the precious reputation of one man.

“Well,” shouted the other voice menacingly, “do you want to know the truth? Haven’t you read it often enough? Instead of hoping you will return, they pray that you are DEAD!”

He hissed the words out, then added, “They prefer to think that you are dead. Why–damn it!–they turn to that belief for COMFORT!”

Constance had seized Mrs. Palmer by the arm, and, acting in concert, they threw both their weights against the thin wooden door.

It yielded with a crash.

Inside the room was dark.

Indistinctly Constance could make out two figures, one standing, the other seated in a deep rocker.

A suppressed exclamation of surprise was followed by a hasty lunge of the standing figure toward her.

Constance reached quickly into her handbag and drew out the little ivory-handled pistol.

“Bang!” it spat almost into the man’s face.

Choking, sputtering, the man groped a minute blindly, then fell on the floor and frantically tried to rise again and call out.