nd you, but I
found Miss MacArthur. That was the only thing about it that could be
called accidental. Your mother and sister were worried about you. They
said it had been much longer than such periods usually were since they
had heard from you. So I left my note and was coming away. Miss
MacArthur said she would come with me and offered to drive me back to
town. When we got into her car she said she thought she knew where you
were and would take me to you. She did not say anything more nor ask any
questions until she had stopped outside here at the curb, when she
looked up and saw the lighted windows and said you were surely here.
Then she pointed out the place in the dark where the stairs were and
told me how to find your door. She waited, though, to make sure before
she drove away. I heard her go."

He had no word to say in the little pause she made there. He felt the
pulse beating in his temples and clutched with tremulous hands the wooden
arms of his chair. Until she had mentioned Jennie MacArthur's name it had
not occurred to him to wonder how she had been enabled to come to him. It
could only have been through Jennie, of course. Jennie was the only
person who knew. But why had Jennie disclosed his secret (her own at the
same time, he was sure; she never would have expected Mary's clear eyes
even to try to evade the unescapable inference)--why had she revealed to
Mary, whom she had never seen before, a fact which she had guarded with
so impregnable a loyalty all these many years?

The only possible answer was that Jennie had divined, under the girl's
well-bred poise, the desperation which was now terrifying him. It was no
nightmare then of his own overwrought imagination. Jennie had perceived
the emergency--the actual life-or-death emergency--and with courageous
inspiration had done, unhesitatingly, the one thing that could possibly
meet the case. She had given him his chance. Jennie!

He arrived at that terminus just as Mary finished speaking. In the pause
that followed she did not at first look at him. Her gaze had come to rest
upon that abortive musical typewriter of his. Not quite in focus upon it,
but as if in some corner of her mind she was wondering what it might be.
But as the pause spun itself out, her glance, seeking his face, moved
quickly enough to catch the look of consternation that it wore. She read
it--misread it luckily--and her own lighted amazingly with a beam of pure
amusement.

"I suppose i