It was after nine o’clock when one of the Cardew cars stopped not far from the Benedict Apartments, and Willy Cameron got out.

He was quite certain that Louis Akers would know where Lily was, and he anticipated the interview with a sort of grim humor.  There might be another fight; certainly Akers would try to get back at him for the night before.  But he set his jaw.  He would learn where Lily was if he had to choke the knowledge out of that leering devil’s thick white throat.  His arrival in the foyer of the Benedict Apartments caused more than a ripple of excitement.

“Well, look who’s here!” muttered the telephone girl, and watched his approach, with its faint limp, over the top of her desk.  Behind, from his cage, the elevator man was staring with avid interest.

“I suppose Mr. Akers is in?” said Willy Cameron, politely.  The girl smiled up at him.

“I’ll say he ought to be, after last night!  What’re you going to do now?  Kill him?”

In spite of his anxiety there was a faint twinkle in Willy Cameron’s eyes.

“No,” he said slowly.  “No.  I think not.  I want to talk to him.”

“Sam,” called the telephone girl, “take this gentleman up to forty-three.”

“Forty-three’s out.”  Sam partly shut the elevator door; he had seen Forty-three’s rooms the night before, and he had the discretion of his race.  “Went out with a lady at quarter to five.”

Willy Cameron took a step or two toward the cage.

“You don’t happen to be lying, I suppose?”

“No, sir!” said Sam.  “I’ll take you up to look, if you like.  And about an hour ago he sent a boy here with a note, to get some of his clothes.  The young lady at the desk was out at the movies at the time.”

“I was getting my supper, Sam.”

Willy Cameron had gone very white.

“Did the boy say where he was taking the things?”

“To the Saint Elmo Hotel, sir.”

On the street again Willy Cameron took himself fiercely in hand.  There were a half-dozen reasons why Akers might go to the Saint Elmo.  He might, for one thing, have thought that he, Cameron, would go back to the Benedict.  He might be hiding from Dan, or from reporters.  But there had been, apparently, no attempt to keep his new quarters secret.  If Lily was at the Saint Elmo—­

He found a taxicab, and as it drew up at the curb before the hotel he saw the Cardew car moving away.  It gave him his first real breath for twenty minutes.  Lily was not there.

But Louis Akers was.  He got his room number from a clerk and went up, still determinedly holding on to himself.  Afterwards he had no clear recollection of any interval between the Benedict and the moment he found himself standing outside a door on an upper floor of the Saint Elmo.  From that time on it was as clear as crystal, his own sudden calm, the overturning of a chair inside, a man’s voice, slightly raised, which he recognized, and then the thin crash of a wineglass dropped or thrown to the floor.