Wren replaced the note, and let his eyes drop to the check. It did not bear Macgowan's name, and the signature was wholly strange to Wren.
After a moment he drew a quick breath, looked down at the desk, replaced the newspaper and weight as they had been originally, then turned and walked to the window-seat. There he sank down, staring out at the street and park beyond.
His brain was at work now, dreadfully at work. Viola! So Macgowan knew her by that other name, the same name Dorothy Armstrong had used. Viola Bland! And what information did Macgowan want—how long had Mrs. Fowler been collecting information for Macgowan? A little shiver passed through Wren's body. He remembered now about his flight to Tampa, and putting two and two together, began to form an unescapable certainty.
Presently he took off his black-rimmed glasses and polished them methodically. Fiery and impulsive as Jimmy Wren was, in a moment of crisis he was anything but emotional. The blow was sudden and severe, staggering him and sending all his scheme of things into reeling chaos; yet it was not in him to take it with any hysterical whirlwind of outward display. Instead, as he came to cold realization of the truth, all the acute perception of his character was wakened and rallied to face the situation.
The hurt was there, and it was deep, but not so deep as Jimmy Wren thought with the first blaze of pain. His quick, sharp wakening was proof sufficient of this. In Macgowan's handwriting he was given a broadly comprehensive vision of Mrs. Fowler to which he could not blind himself. Nor did he doubt or quibble for an instant. The feeling which he had taken for love was wrenched out of him with fearful abruptness, but no vacuum remained.
Fright deadened the force and the pain of it; a horrified fright, as the man comprehended what had been going on during these weeks and months of the campaign against Macgowan. All this while, Armstrong's right-hand man had been confiding everything in his heart, hopes and fears and plans, to the ear of a hired spy. That was the cold fact of it.
"By golly, but I've been a fool!" murmured Wren abjectly. "To think that she'd do me that way—why, she's lied like a Trojan to me!"
Suddenly he reacted; it was characteristic of him. Another man might have pondered his folly, mourned the consequences of his blindness. Jimmy Wren was abruptly stirred to sanity, to a cold anger, to a keen lust of fight. His one thought now was how best he could strike back, repay this blow, use this bitter knowledge to repair the damage he must have unwillingly caused Armstrong.
Face Mrs. Fowler down? No. To let the enemy know they were discovered, would effect nothing. Outwardly cool, inwardly a seething mass of activity, Jimmy Wren decided upon that keynote of caution—and then leaned forward, his attention drawn by a taxicab which had just pulled up at the curb below his window. A man alighted and assisted his companion out; his companion was Mrs. Fowler.
But the man—the man himself! Jimmy Wren's eyes blazed as he craned forward, unable to recognize the figure, as the two below him stood a moment in talk. Then the man doffed his hat, and a low whistle broke from Wren. He had not seen that face in long months, yet he knew it again at sight, knew it and thought of Armstrong's deadly trouble. Pete Slosson!