We had not noticed a car which had stopped just past us and Garrick was surprised at hearing his own name called.

We looked up from contemplating the discovery he had made in the road, to see Miss Winslow waving to us. She had motored down from Tuxedo immediately after receiving the message over the telephone, and with her keen eye had picked out both the place of the accident and ourselves studying it.

As we approached, I could see that she was much more pale than usual. Evidently her anxiety for Warrington was thoroughly genuine. The slanderous letter had not shaken her faith in him, yet.

She had left her car and was walking back along the road with us toward the broken fence. Garrick had been talking to her earnestly and now, having introduced her to Dr. Mead, the doctor and he decided to climb down to inspect the wrecked car itself in the ravine below.

Miss Winslow cast a quick look from the broken fence down at the torn and twisted wreckage of the car and gave a suppressed little cry and shudder.

"How is Mortimer?" she asked of me eagerly, for I had agreed to stay with her while the others went down the slope. "I mean how is he really? Is he likely to be better soon, as Mr. Garrick said over the telephone?" she appealed.

"Surely—absolutely," I assured her, knowing that if Garrick had said that he had meant it. "Miss Winslow, believe me, neither Mr. Garrick nor Dr. Mead is concealing anything. It is pretty bad, of course. Such things are always bad. But it might be far worse. And besides, the worst now has passed."

Garrick had already promised to accompany her over to Dr. Mead\'s after he had made his examination of the wrecked car to confirm what the doctor had already observed. It took several minutes for them to satisfy themselves and meanwhile Violet Winslow, already highly unstrung by the news from Garrick, waited more and more nervously.

In spite of his careful examination of the wrecked car, Garrick found practically nothing more than Dr. Mead had already told him. It was with considerable relief that Miss Winslow saw the two again climbing up the slope in the direction of the road.

A few minutes later we were on our way back, Dr. Mead and Garrick leading the way in the doctor\'s car, while I accompanied Miss Winslow in her own car.

She said little, and it was plain to see that she was consumed by anxiety. Now and then she would ask a question about the accident, and although I tried in every way to divert her mind to other subjects she unfailingly came back to that.

Tempering the details as much as I could I repeated for her just what had happened to the best of our knowledge.

"And you have no idea who it could have been?" she asked turning those liquid eyes of hers on my face.

If there were any secret about it, it was perhaps fortunate that I did not know. I don\'t think I am more than ordinarily susceptible and I know I did not delude myself that Miss Winslow ever could be anything except a friend to either Garrick or myself. But I felt I could not resist the appeal in those eyes. I wondered if even they, by some magic intuition, might not pierce the very soul of man and uncover a lying heart. I felt that Warrington could not have been other than he said he was and still have been hastening to meet those eyes.

"Miss Winslow," I answered, "I have no more idea than you have who it could be."

I was telling the truth and I felt that I could meet her gaze.

There must have been something about how I had phrased my answer that caused her to look at me more searchingly than before. Suddenly she turned her face away and gazed at the passing landscape from the car.

She said nothing, but as I continued to watch her finely moulded features, I saw that she was making an effort to control herself. It flashed over me, somehow, that perhaps, after all, she herself suspected someone. It was not that she said anything. It was merely an indefinable impression I received.

Had Warrington any enemies, not in the underworld, but among those of his own set, rivals, perhaps, who might even stoop to secure the aid of those of the underworld who could be bought to commit any crime in the calendar for a price? I did not pause to examine the plausibility or the impossibility of such a theory. What interested me was whether in her mind there was such a thought. Had she, perhaps, really more of an idea than I who it could be? She betrayed nothing of what her intuition told her, but I felt sure that, even though she knew nothing, there was at least something she feared.

At last we arrived at Dr. Mead\'s and I handed her out of the car and into the tastefully furnished little house. There was an air of quietness about it that often indefinably pervades a house in which there is illness or a tragedy.

"May I—see him?" pleaded Miss Winslow, as Dr. Mead placed a chair for her.

I wondered what he would have done if there had been some good reason why he should resist the pleading of her deep eyes.

"Why—er—for a minute—yes," he answered. "Later, soon, he may see visitors longer, but just now I think for a few hours the less he is disturbed the better."

The doctor excused himself for a moment to look at his patient and prepare him for the visit. Meanwhile Miss Winslow waited in the reception room downstairs, still very pale and nervous.

Warrington was in much less pain now than he had been when we left and Dr. Mead decided that, since the nurse had made him so much more comfortable, no further drug was necessary. In fact as his natural vitality due to his athletic habits and clean living asserted itself, it seemed as if his injuries which at first had looked so serious were not likely to prove as bad as the doctor had anticipated.

Still, he was badly enough as it was. The new nurse smoothed out his pillows and deftly tried to conceal as much as she could that would suggest how badly he was injured and at last Violet Winslow was allowed to enter the room where the poor boy lay.

Miss Winslow never for a moment let her wonderful self-control fail her. Quickly and noiselessly, like a ministering angel, she seemed to float rather than walk over the space from the door to the bed.

As she bent over him and whispered, "Mortimer!" the simple tone seemed to have an almost magic effect on him.

He opened his eyes which before had been languidly closed and gazed up at her face as if he saw a vision. Slowly the expression on his face changed as he realized that it was indeed Violet herself. In spite of the pain of his hurts which must have been intense a smile played over his features, as if he realized that it would never do to let her know how serious had been his condition.

As she bent over her hand had rested on the white covers of the bed. Feebly, in spite of the bandages that swathed the arm nearest her, he put out his own brawny hand and rested it on hers. She did not withdraw it, but passed the other hand gently over his throbbing forehead. Never have I seen a greater transformation in an invalid than was evident in Mortimer Warrington. No tonic in all the pharmacopoeia of Dr. Mead could have worked a more wonderful change.

Not a word was said by either Warrington or Violet for several seconds. They seemed content just to gaze into each other\'s faces, oblivious to us.

Warrington was the first to break the silence, in answer to what he knew must be her unspoken question.

"Your aunt—gambling," he murmured feebly, trying hard to connect his words so as to appear not so badly off as ............