“Did you notice the number of the taxicab?”

“I never thought of it.”

He saw it all with terrible distinctness, The man was Akers, of course.  Then, if she had left her home rather than give him up, she was really in love with him.  He had too much common sense to believe for a moment that she had fled to Louis Akers’ protection, however.  That was the last thing she would do.  She would have gone to a hotel, or to the Doyle house.

“She shouldn’t have left home, Ellen.”

“They drove her out, I tell you,” Ellen cried, irritably.  “At least that’s what it amounted to.  There are things no high-minded girl will stand.  Can you lend me some money, Willy?”

He felt in his pocket, producing a handful of loose money.

“Of course you can have all I’ve got,” he said.  “But you must not go to-night, Miss Ellen.  It’s too late.  I’ll give you my room and go in with Dan Boyd.”

And he prevailed over her protests, in the end.  It was not until he saw her settled there, hiding her sense of strangeness under an impassive mask, that he went downstairs again and took his hat from its hook.

Lily must go back home, he knew.  It was unthinkable that she should break with her family, and go to the Doyles.  He had too little self-consciousness to question the propriety of his own interference, too much love for her to care whether she resented that interference.  And he was filled with a vast anger at Jim Doyle.  He saw in all this, somehow, Doyle’s work; how it would play into Doyle’s plans to have Anthony Cardew’s granddaughter a member of his household.  He would take her away from there if he had to carry her.

He was a long time in getting to the mill district, and a longer time still in finding Cardew Way.  At an all-night pharmacy he learned which was the house, and his determined movements took on a sort of uncertainty.  It was very late.  Ellen had waited for him for some time.  If Lily were in that sinister darkened house across the street, the family had probably retired.  And for the first time, too, he began to doubt if Doyle would let him see her.  Lily herself might even refuse to see him.

Nevertheless, the urgency to get her away from there, if she were there, prevailed at last, and a strip of light in an upper window, as from an imperfectly fitting blind, assured him that some one was still awake in the house.

He went across the street and opening the gate, strode up the walk.  Almost immediately he was confronted by the figure of a man who had been concealed by the trunk of one of the trees.  He lounged forward, huge, menacing, yet not entirely hostile.

“Who is it?” demanded the figure blocking his way.

“I want to see Mr. Doyle.”

“What about?”

“I’ll tell him that,” said Willy Cameron.

“What’s your name?”

“That’s my business, too,” said Mr. Cameron, with disarming pleasantness.