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 it is rather overwhelming,” she said; “a conjunction like that.  I mean, that it should have been she who brought me here.  But really, unless one accepts all the traditional motives and explanations that one finds in books, it shouldn’t be surprising that she should undertake a friendly service for some one else she saw was fond of you, too.  Not when one considers the wonderful person she is.”

If his sheer adoration of her were enough to save her then she was safe, whatever the peril.  But he doubted if it would be enough.