There wasn’t much sleep for me that night. About all I could say to myself was that I’d saved Jack. But the others—Oh, _the others_! I couldn’t get them out of my mind. They’d come in a procession across the dark and look at me sad and reproachful. Mr. Whitney, who’d done everything in the world for me, and Mr. George, who could put on such side, but had always been so kind and cordial, and O’Mally, who’d told Babbitts the case was going to make him, and Babbitts—Oh, _Babbitts_! I rolled over on the pillow and cried scalding, bitter tears. It wasn’t only the scoop—it was that I’d have a secret from him forever—him that up to now had known every thought in my mind, had been like the other half of me. They say virtue is its own reward, and I’ve always believed it. But that night I had the awful thought that maybe I’d done wrong, for all the reward I got was to feel like an outcast with a stone for a heart. CHAPTER XVII JACK TELLS THE STORY That night when I left Molly there was only one thought in my mind—to reach Carol and help her get away. If the figure of Barker had not stood between us I would have then and there implored her to marry me and give me the right to fight for her. But I knew that was hopeless. As things stood, all I could do was to tell her the situation and give her a chance to escape. I suppose it’s a pretty damaging confession but the office, my duty to my work and my associates, cut no ice at all. Heretofore I’d rather patted myself on the back as a man who stood by his obligations. That night only one obligation existed for me—to protect from disgrace the woman I loved. I knew the trains to Azalea—it was on the road to Firehill—and though one left at midnight, the last train on the branch line to the Azalea Woods Estates had long gone. The shortest and quickest way for me to get there was to take out my own car. This would also insure the necessary secrecy. I could bring her back with me and let her slip away in the crowds at one of the big stations. It was a wild, windy night, a waning moon showing between long streamers of clouds. By the time I struck the New Jersey shore—after maddening delays in the garage and at the ferry—it was getting on for one, and the clouds had spread black over the sky. It was a fiendish ride for a man on fire as I was. For miles the road looped through a country as dark as a pocket, broken with ice-skimmed pools and deep-driven ruts. In the daylight I could have made the whole distance inside an hour, but it was after two when I came to the branch line junction and turned up the long winding road that led over the hills to the Azalea Woods Estates. As I sighted the little red-roofed station and the houses dotted over the tract, the moon came out and I slowed up, having no idea where the cottage was or what it looked like. The place was quiet as the grave, the light sleeping on the pale walls of the stucco villas backed by the wooded darkness of the hills.