The introduction of Louis Akers’ name had a sobering effect on Anthony Cardew.  After all, more than anything else, he wanted Akers defeated.  The discussion slowly lost its acrimony, and ended, oddly enough, in Willy Cameron and Anthony Cardew virtually uniting against Howard.  What Willy Cameron told about Jim Doyle fed the old man’s hatred of his daughter’s husband, and there was something very convincing about Cameron himself.  Something of fearlessness and honesty that began, slowly, to dispose Anthony in his favor.

It was Howard who held out.

“If I quit now it will look as though I didn’t want to take a licking,” he said, quietly obstinate.  “Grant your point, that I’m defeated.  All right, I’ll be defeated—­but I won’t quit.”

And Anthony Cardew, confronted by that very quality of obstinacy which had been his own weapon for so many years, retired in high dudgeon to his upper rooms.  He was living in a strange new world, a reasonable soul on an unreasonable earth, an earth where a man’s last sanctuary, his club, was blown up about him, and a man’s family apparently lived only to thwart him.

With Anthony gone, Howard dropped the discussion with the air of a man who has made a final stand.

“What you have said about Mr. Doyle interests me greatly,” he observed, “because—­you probably do not know this—­my sister married him some years ago.  It was a most unhappy affair.”

“I do know it.  For that reason I am glad that Miss Lily has come home.”

“Has come home?  She has not come home, Mr. Cameron.  There was a condition we felt forced to make, and she refused to agree to it.  Perhaps we were wrong.  I—­”

Willy Cameron got up.

“Was that to-day?” he asked.

“No.”

“But she was coming home to-day.  She was to leave there this afternoon.”

“How do you know that?”

“Denslow saw her there this afternoon.  She agreed to leave at once.  He had told her of the bombs, and of other things.  She hadn’t understood before, and she was horrified.  It is just possible Doyle wouldn’t let her go.”

“But—­that’s ridiculous.  She can’t be a prisoner in my sister’s house.”

“Will you telephone and find out if she is there?” Howard went to the telephone at once.  It seemed to Willy Cameron that he stood there for uncounted years, and as though, through all that eternity of waiting, he knew what the answer would be.  And that he knew, too, what that answer meant, where she had gone, what she had done.  If only she had come to him.  If only she had come to him.  He would have saved her from herself.  He—­

“She is not there,” Howard Cardew said, in a voice from which all life had gone.  “She left this afternoon, at four o’clock.  Of course she has friends.  Or she may have gone to a hotel.  We had managed to make it practically impossible for her to come home.”