Armstrong had ceased to evince interest in the various suits and legal activities; their issue or rather lack of issue now mattered nothing to him. What did matter was Dorothy's accusation. Upon what had she based her arraignment? She must have acted after deliberate thought, with apparently firm grounds. He could only lay hold upon the obsession that he had robbed her father of Food Products; any other surmise could only appear weak and unsatisfactory. He had been tempted to cable the Demings to come home and help straighten the thing out-- "Look here, Reese!" broke in the voice of Jimmy Wren again. Wren seated himself on one corner of the desk and lowered his voice to a confidential pitch. The warm geniality of his features, however, was obviously an attempt, an effort, and could not quite disguise the anxiety in his eyes as he regarded Armstrong. "If you're not doing anything to-night," he went on, "s'pose you let me take you uptown and meet a friend of mine, will you? This is just between you and me, Reese. I'd like to have you meet her--haven't mentioned it before, because we've all been so infernally balled up with this campaign." Armstrong smiled slightly at him. "What, Jimmy! Are you hooked at last?" "Not yet, but I'd like to be! You come along with me to-night, Reese, and we'll have a bit of real music that'll take the edge off your nerves. Come on, now, will you? Or wait--this is Saturday! I'll call her up, and we may run up there this afternoon, and all have dinner and a show later on. What say?" Armstrong hesitated. Although he was well enough aware that this proposal was made to provide some distraction for him, he knew that he needed the distraction. Besides, he was curious about Jimmy Wren's very secret love affair. "You've kept quiet about her, Jimmy--why?" "Well, she wanted me to," admitted Jimmy Wren, reddening a bit. "You see, she doesn't go in for gay life and all that sploshy stuff--to tell the truth, she's given me a lot of help these days--well, it's just that she understands, see? We're not engaged yet or anything like that; she just lets me come around, and we have some music, and talk. You'd have to know her to understand, Reese." Armstrong's lips twitched; this took him back to college days. He was upon the point of accepting Jimmy's invitation, when the telephone rang. He pulled forward the instrument. "Armstrong? This is Todrank speaking." Todrank was his banker, not a warm personal friend, but a man of wide influence and connections. His interest in the fight on Findlater and Macgowan had been keen and tense, because Todrank was a man who never relented unto an enemy. And, at some period in the past, Todrank and Lawrence Macgowan had been bitter enemies. Macgowan might have, probably had, forgotten this fact, but with Todrank there was no past tense. If he liked Armstrong, it was largely because he hated Macgowan.