Then, before Guy could answer, she explained, “I am Miss Violet Winslow.  A friend of mine, Mr. Warrington, has told me that you are investigating a peculiar case for him—­the strange loss of his car.”

Garrick hastened to place a chair for her in the least cluttered and dusty part of the room.  There she sat, looking up at him earnestly, a dainty contrast to the den in which Garrick was working out the capture of criminals, violent and vicious.

“I have the honor to be able to say, ‘Yes’ to all that you have asked, Miss Winslow,” he replied.  “Is there any way in which I can be of service to you?”

I thought a smile played over his face at the thought that perhaps she might have come to ask him to work for three clients instead of two.

At any rate, the girl was very much excited and very much in earnest, as she opened her handbag and drew from it a letter which she handed to Garrick.

“I received that letter,” she explained, speaking rapidly, “in the noon mail to-day.  I don’t know what to make of it.  It worries me to get such a thing.  What do you suppose it was sent to me for?  Who could have sent it?”

She was leaning forward artlessly on her crossed knee looking expectantly up into Garrick’s face, oblivious to everything else, even her own enticing beauty.  There was something so simple and sincere about Violet Winslow that one felt instinctively that nothing was too great a price to shield her from the sordid and the evil in the world.  Yet something had happened that had brought her already into the office of a detective.

Garrick had glanced quickly at the outside of the slit envelope.  The postmark showed that it had been mailed early that morning at the general post office and that there was slight chance of tracing anything in that direction.

Then he opened it and read.  The writing was in a bold scrawl and hastily executed: 

You have heard, no doubt, of the alleged loss of an automobile by Mr. Mortimer Warrington.  I have seen your name mentioned in the society columns of the newspapers in connection with him several times lately.  Let a disinterested person whom you do not know warn you in time.  There is more back of it than he will care to tell.  I can say nothing of the nefarious uses to which that car has been put, but you will learn more shortly.  Meanwhile, let me inform you that he and some of the wilder of his set had that night planned a visit to a gambling house on Forty-eighth Street.  I myself saw the car standing before another gambling den on Forty-seventh Street about the same time.  This place, I may as well inform you, bears an unsavory reputation as a gambling joint to which young ladies of the fastest character are admitted.  If you will ask someone in whom you have confidence and whom you can ask to work secretly for you to look up the records, you will find that much of the property on these two blocks, and these two places in particular, belongs to the Warrington estate.  Need I say more?