"Grant your point, that I'm defeated. All
right, I'll be defeated--but I won't quit."

And Anthony Cardew, confronted by that very quality of obstinacy which
had been his own weapon for so many years, retired in high dudgeon to
his upper rooms. He was living in a strange new world, a reasonable soul
on an unreasonable earth, an earth where a man's last sanctuary, his
club, was blown up about him, and a man's family apparently lived only
to thwart him.

With Anthony gone, Howard dropped the discussion with the air of a man
who has made a final stand.

"What you have said about Mr. Doyle interests me greatly," he observed,
"because--you probably do not know this--my sister married him some
years ago. It was a most unhappy affair."

"I do know it. For that reason I am glad that Miss Lily has come home."

"Has come home? She has not come home, Mr. Cameron. There was a
condition we felt forced to make, and she refused to agree to it.
Perhaps we were wrong. I--"

Willy Cameron got up.

"Was that to-day?" he asked.

"No."

"But she was coming home to-day. She was to leave there this afternoon."

"How do you know that?"

"Denslow saw her there this afternoon. She agreed to leave at once. He
had told her of the bombs, and of other things. She hadn't understood
before, and she was horrified. It is just possible Doyle wouldn't let
her go."

"But--that's ridiculous. She can't be a prisoner in my sister's house."

"Will you telephone and find out if she is there?" Howard went to the
telephone at once. It seemed to Willy Cameron that he stood there for
uncounted years, and as though, through all that eternity of waiting, he
knew what the answer would be. And that he knew, too, what that answer
meant, where she had gone, what she had done. If only she had come to
him. If only she had come to him. He would have saved her from herself.
He--

"She is not there," Howard Cardew said, in a voice from which all life
had gone. "She left this afternoon, at four o'clock. Of course she has
friends. Or she may have gone to a hotel. We had managed to make it
practically impossible for her to come home."

Willy Cameron glanced at his watch. He had discounted the worst before
it came, and unlike the older man, was ready for action. It was he who
took hold of the situation.

"Order a car, Mr. Cardew, and go to the hotels," he said. "And if you
will drop me downtown--I'll tell you where--I'll follow up something
that has just occ