Then, with a quick gathering of her skirts, she turned and almost fled from the room.

She had scarcely closed the door before Garrick was telephoning anxiously all over the city in order to get in touch with Warrington himself.

“I’m not going to tell him too much about her visit,” he remarked, with a pleased smile at the outcome of the interview, though his face clouded as his eye fell again on the blackmailing letter, lying before him.  “It might make him think too highly of himself.  Besides, I want to see, too, whether he has told us the whole truth about the affair that night.”

Somehow or other it seemed impossible to find Warrington in any of his usual haunts, either at his office or at his club.

Garrick had given it up, almost, as a bad job, when, half an hour later, Warrington himself burst in on us, apparently expecting more news about his car.

Instead, Garrick handed him the letter.

“Say,” he demanded as he ran through it with puckered face, then slapped it down on the table before Guy, in a high state of excitement, “what do you make of that?”

He looked from one to the other of us blankly.

“Isn’t it bad enough to lose a car without being slandered about it into the bargain?” he asked heatedly, then adding in disgust, “And to do it in such an underhand way, writing to a girl like Violet, and never giving me a chance to square myself.  If I could get my hands on that fellow,” he added viciously, “I’d qualify him for the coroner!”

Warrington had flown into a towering and quite justifiable rage.  Garrick, however, ignored his anger as natural under the circumstances, and was about to ask him a question.

“Just a moment, Garrick,” forestalled Warrington.  “I know just what you are going to say.  You are going to ask me about those gambling places.  Now, Garrick, I give you my word of honor that I did not know until to-day that the property in that neighborhood was owned by our estate.  I have been in that joint on Forty-eighth Street—­I’ll admit that.  But, you know, I’m no gambler.  I’ve gone simply to see the life, and—­well, it has no attraction for me.  Racing cars and motorboats don’t go with poker chips and the red and black—­not with me.  As for the other place, I don’t know any more about it than—­than you do,” he concluded vehemently.

Warrington faced Garrick, his steel-blue eye unwavering.  “You see, it’s like this,” he resumed passionately, “since this vice investigation began, I have read a lot about landlords.  Then, too,” he interjected with a mock wry face, “I knew that Violet’s Aunt Emma had been a crusader or something of the sort.  You see, virtue is not its own reward.  I don’t get credit even for what I intended to do—­quite the contrary.”

“How’s that?” asked Garrick, respecting the young man’s temper.