“I could make those two jump out of the window with fright and surprise,” he said to me, still fingering the switch impatiently.  “You see, it works the other way, too, as I told you, if I choose to throw this switch.  Suppose I should shout out, and they should hear, apparently coming from the fireplace, ’You are discovered.  Thank you for telling me all your plans, but I am prepared for them already.’  What do you suppose they would—­”

Garrick stopped short.

From the vocaphone had come a sound like the ringing of a bell.

“Sh!” whispered Lucille hoarsely.  “Here she comes now.  Didn’t I tell you?  Into the next room!”

A moment later came a knock at a door and Lucille’s silken rustle as she hurried to open it.

“How do you do, Lucille?” we heard a sweetly tremulous voice repeated by the faithful little vocaphone.

“Comment vous portez-vous, Mademoiselle?”

“Tres bien.”

“Mademoiselle honours her poor Lucille beyond her dreams.  Will you not be seated here in this easy chair?”

“My God!” exclaimed Garrick, starting back from the vocaphone.  “She is there alone.  Mrs. de Lancey is not with her.  Oh, if we could only have prevented this!”

I had recognized, too, even in the mechanical reproduction, the voice of Violet Winslow.  It came as a shock.  Even though I had been expecting some such thing for hours, still the reality meant just as much, perhaps more.

Independent, self-reliant, Violet Winslow had gone alone on an act of mercy and charity, and it had taken her into a situation full of danger with her faithless maid.

At once I was alive to the situation.  All the stories of kidnappings and white slavery that I had ever read rioted through my head.  I felt like calling out a warning.  Garrick had his finger on the switch.

“Since I have been ill, Mademoiselle, I have been doing some embroidery—­handkerchiefs—­are they not pretty?”

It was coming.  There was not time for an instant’s delay now.

Garrick quickly depressed the switch.

Clear as a bell his voice rang out.

“Miss Winslow—­this is Garrick.  Don’t let her get that handkerchief under your nose.  Out of the door—­quick.  Run!  Call for help!  I shall be with you in a minute!”

A little cry came out of the machine.

There was a moment of startled surprise in the room below.  Then followed a mocking laugh.

“Ha!  Ha!  I thought you’d pull something like that, Garrick.  I don’t know where you are, but it makes no difference.  There are many ways of getting out of this place and at one of them I hare a high-powered car.  Violet—­will go—­quietly—­” there were sounds of a struggle—­“after the needle—­”

A scream had followed immediately after a sound of shivering glass through the vocaphone.  It was not Violet Winslow’s scream, either.

“Like hell, she’ll go,” shouted a wildly familiar voice.