"Mr. Clancy," she said, motioning slightly to a chair near the one in which she was seated. "This is a most unfortunate circumstance. My brother is quite overcome. He's really ill, yet I had to drag him up here, almost by force, last night. The reporters were simply besieging the house, and my brother was so nervously unstrung that I had to call in a doctor. I've seen it coming for a long time, and that terrible article in the paper yesterday was the last straw. You've seen it, I suppose?" Her eyes narrowed as she keenly regarded Peter, and there was a drawing together of her handsome eyebrows which boded ill for him if he could not assure her of his innocence in the matter. "I had a wire from my partner early this morning," Peter replied, with the calm of conscious rectitude, "and I was able to get the paper at Tollenville on my way over. That was absolutely the first I knew that the story had leaked out. You must see, Mrs. Atterbury, from the tone of the entire article, that my office could not possibly have given it to the papers. A firm of detectives couldn't last long, if it was as leaky as that. I will admit," he added, candidly, "that I advised Mr. Morris some time ago that our best bet was to give out the story so as to get the help of the general public in tracing Miss Blake--and her sister. You sometimes get information that way that you can't get by private inquiry. We would have been able, through personal connection with the papers, to keep Mr. Morris's name entirely out of it. I urged it on him several times, but he couldn't see it that way, and I was forced to give it up. We are acting entirely in Mr. Morris's interests"--he said this gravely, and with a dignity which was very convincing--"and my office would not go contrary to his wishes in any particular. I must ask you and Mr. Morris to believe this." "Well," conceded Helena Atterbury, unbending slightly, "I suppose I must take your word for it, Mr. Clancy. My brother seems to have a great deal of confidence in you. But I can't think--I can't see how Mr. Jones could have done such a thing. I believe your partner told Mr. Morris that the story could only have come from him. Why, I've entertained him at my house. He accepted my hospitality, and----" "Mrs. Atterbury," Peter interrupted, with a shake of his head, "I'm afraid you don't understand what lengths people will go to for the sake of advertising. They seem to lose all sense of decency sometimes. I knew it was a risk to let Frederick Jones in on the game, but there were certain things we had to know and he was bound, being her manager, to find out sooner or later, probably sooner than later, that she'd disappeared. I hope you can see that we had no choice." Helena Atterbury, in spite of her annoyance at the contretemps, could not fail to be impressed by the ingenuous sincerity of the young detective's speech and manner. Her voice had lost much of its icy hauteur when she spoke again.