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“Mr. Drummond,” she replied, “I don’t care to talk to you.”

“You don’t, hey? Well, perhaps, when the time comes you’ll have to talk. How about that?”

She was thinking rapidly. Was Mrs. Warrington preparing to strike a blow that would be the last impulse necessary to send the plunger down for the last time? She decided to take a chance, to temporize until some one else made a move.

“I’d thank you to place your fingers on this pad,” said Constance quietly. “I’m making a collection of these things.”

“You are, are you?”

“Yes,” she cut short. “And if my collection isn’t large enough I shall call up Mrs. Warrington and ask her to come over, too,” she added significantly.

Floretta entered again. “Please wipe the ink off Mr. Drummond’s fingers,” ordered Constance quietly, still holding out the pad.

“Confound your impudence,” he ground out, seizing the pad. “There! What do you mean by Mrs. Warrington? What has she to do with this? Have a care, Mrs. Dunlap–you’re on the wrong track here, and going the wrong way.”

“Mr. Warrington is–” began Floretta.

“Show him in–quick,” demanded Constance, determined to bring the affair to a show-down on the spot.

As the door swung open, Warrington looked at the group in unfeigned surprise.

“Mr. Warrington,” greeted Constance without giving any of the others a chance, “this morning, I heard a little conversation up here. Floretta, will you go into the little room, and on the top shelf you will find a bottle. Bring it here carefully. I have a sheet of paper, also, which I am going to show you. I had already seen the little woman, Mr. Warrington, whom you have treated so unjustly. She was here trying vainly to win you back by those arts which she thinks must appeal to you.”

Floretta returned with the bottle and placed it on the secretary beside Constance.

“Some one took some tablets from this bottle and gave them to some one else who wrote on this paper,” she resumed, bending first over the paper she had torn from the pad. “Ah, a loop with twelve ridges, another loop, a whorl, a whorl, a loop. The marks on this paper correspond precisely with those made here just now by–Vera Charmant herself!”

“You get out of here–quick,” snarled Drummond, placing himself between the now furious Vera and Constance.

“One minute,” replied Constance calmly. “I am sure Mr. Warrington is a gentleman, if you are not. Perhaps I have no finger prints to correspond with those on the bottle. If not, I am sure that we can send for some one whose prints will do so.”

She was studying the bottle.

“The other, however,” she said slowly to conceal her own surprise, “was a person who has been set to trail you and Stella, Mr. Warrington, a detective named Drummond!”

Suddenly the truth flashed over her. Drummond was not employed by Mrs. Warrington at all. Then by whom? By the directors. And the rest of these people? Grafters who were using Stella to bait the hook. Braden had gone over to them, had aided in plunging Warrington into the wild life until he could no longer play the business game as before. Charmant was his confederate, Drummond his witness.

“Stella,” said Constance, turning suddenly to the little actress, “Stella, they are using you, ‘Diamond Jack’ and Vera, using you to lead him on, playing the game of the minority of the directors of the Syndicate to get him out. There is to be a meeting of the directors to-night at the Prince Henry. He was to be in no condition to go. Are you willing to be mixed up in such a scandal?”

Stella Larue was crying into a lace handkerchief. “You–you are all –against me,” she sobbed. “What have I done?”

“Nothing,” soothed Constance, patting her shoulder. “As for Charmant and Drummond, they are tied by these proofs,” she added, tapping the papers with the prints, then picking them up and handing them to Warrington. “I think if the story were told to the directors at the Prince Henry to-night with reporters waiting downstairs in the lobby, it might produce a quieting effect.”

Warrington was speechless. He saw them all against him, Vera, Braden, Stella, Drummond.

“More than that,” added Constance, “nothing that you can ever do can equal the patience, the faith of the little woman I saw here to-day, slaving, yes, slaving for beauty. Here in my hand, in these scraps of paper, I hold your old life,–not part of it, but ALL of it,” she emphasized. “You have your chance. Will you take it?”

He looked up quickly at Stella Larue. She had risen impulsively and flung her arms about Constance.

“Yes,” he muttered huskily, taking the papers, “all of it.”