The words, jerky though they were, cost him a great physical effort to say.  She seemed to realize it, but there was a look of triumph on her face as she understood.

She had not been mistaken.  Warrington was all that she had thought him to be.

He was looking eagerly into her face and as he looked he read in it the answer to the questionings that had sent him off in the early hours of the morning on his fateful ride to Tuxedo.

Dr. Mead cleared his throat.  Miss Winslow recognised it as a signal that the time was growing short for the interview.

Reluctantly, she withdrew her hand from his, their eyes met another instant, and with a hasty word of sympathy and encouragement she left the room, conscious now that other eyes were watching.

“Oh, to think it was to tell me that that he got into it all,” she cried, as she sank into a deep chair in the reception room, endeavouring not to give way to her feelings, now that the strain was off and she had no longer to keep a brave face.  “I—­I feel guilty!”

“I wouldn’t say that,” soothed Garrick.  “Who knows?  Perhaps if he had stayed in the city—­they might have succeeded,—­whoever it was back of this thing.”

She looked up at Garrick, startled, I thought, with the same expression I had seen when she turned her face away in the car and I got the impression that she felt more than she knew of the case.

“I may—­see—­Mr. Warrington again soon?” she asked, now again mistress of her feelings after Garrick’s interruption that had served to take her mind off a morbid aspect of the affair.

“Surely,” agreed Dr. Mead.  “I expect his progress to be rapid after this.”

“Thank you,” she murmured, as she slowly rose and prepared to make the return trip to her aunt’s home.

“Oh, Mr. Garrick,” she confided, as he helped her on with the wraps she had thrown carelessly on a chair when she entered, “I can’t help it—­I do feel guilty.  Perhaps he thinks I am—­like Aunt Emma—–­”

“Perhaps it was quite as much to convince your aunt as you that he took the trip,” suggested Garrick.

Miss Winslow understood.  “Why is it,” she murmured, “that sometimes people with the best intentions manage to bring about things that are—­more terrible?”

Garrick smiled.  Quite evidently she and her aunt were not exactly in tune.  He said nothing.

As for Dr. Mead he seemed really pleased, for the patient had brightened up considerably after even the momentary glimpse he had had of Violet.  Altogether I felt that although they had seen each other only for a moment, it had done both good.  Miss Winslow’s fears had been quieted and Warrington had been encouraged by the realisation that, in spite of its disastrous ending, his journey had accomplished its purpose anyway.

There was, as Dr. Mead assured us, every prospect now that Warrington would pull through after the murderous assault that had been made on him.