“Dan can do that.  He’s changed, since she went.”  Ellen glanced toward Mrs. Boyd’s empty room.  “You’ve done enough, Willy.  You’ve seen them through, all of them.  I—­isn’t it time you began to think about yourself?”

He was putting on his coat, and she picked a bit of thread from it, with nervous fingers.

“Where are you going to-night, Willy?”

“To the Cardews.  Mr. Cardew has sent for me.”

She looked up at him.

“Willy, I want to tell you something.  The Cardews won’t let that marriage stand, and you know it.  I think she cares for you.  Don’t look at me like that.  I do.”

“That’s because you are fond of me,” he said, smiling down at her.  “I’m not the sort of man girls care about, Ellen.  Let’s face that.  The General Manager said when he planned me, ’Here’s going to be a fellow who is to have everything in the world, health, intelligence, wit and the beauty of an Adonis, but he has to lack something, so we’ll make it that’.”

But Ellen, glancing up swiftly, saw that although his tone was light, there was pain in his eyes.

He reflected on Edith’s decision as he walked through the park toward the Cardew house.  It had not surprised him, and yet he knew it had cost her an effort.  How great an effort, man-like, he would never understand, but something of what she had gone through he realized.  He wondered vaguely whether, had there never been a Lily Cardew in his life, he could ever have cared for Edith.  Perhaps.  Not the Edith of the early days, that was certain.  But this new Edith, with her gentleness and meekness, her clear, suffering eyes, her strange new humility.

She had sent him a message of warning about Akers, and from it he had reconstructed much of the events of the night she had taken sick.

“Tell him to watch Louis Akers,” she had said.  “I don’t know how near Willy was to trouble the other night, Ellen, but they’re going to try to get him.”

Ellen had repeated the message, watching him narrowly, but he had only laughed.

“Who are they?” she had persisted.

“I’ll tell you all about it some day,” he had said.  But he had told Dan the whole story, and, although he did not know it, Dan had from that time on been his self-constituted bodyguard.  During his campaign speeches Dan was always near, his right hand on a revolver in his coat pocket, and for hours at a time he stood outside the pharmacy, favoring every seeker for drugs or soap or perfume with a scowling inspection.  When he could not do it, he enlisted Joe Wilkinson in the evenings, and sometimes the two of them, armed, policed the meeting halls.

As a matter of fact, Joe Wilkinson was following him that night.  On his way to the Cardews Willy Cameron, suddenly remembering the uncanny ability of Jinx to escape and trail him, remaining meanwhile at a safe distance in the rear, turned suddenly and saw Joe, walking sturdily along in rubber-soled shoes, and obsessed with his high calling of personal detective.