Her destination was not unfamiliar, for the car stopped at a crossing very near the house in which she previously visited her brother, Ashton. But as she rang the bell of his lodgings and awaited the coming of the maid, Alice’s heart beat with fierce excitement. To do what she now purposed to accomplish would put into requisition her best courage, tact, and persistence.
She had written to her brother asking an interview with him at the moment when her suspicions first fell upon his complicity with the much-talked-of newspaper articles about the loss of the emerald at Mrs. Ellison’s dinner. Upon his churlish refusal to receive her on any terms she had set her wits to trace out and discover the tool whom he had doubtless employed to do his noxious work.
This for a time she could not accomplish. But chance finally threw into her way the knowledge that on some previous occasion Carmichael had had so-called literary dealings with a man named Lance, a hack-writer of ability, whose bad habits were fast bringing his usefulness to an end. Now, indeed, fate played into her hands. The year before she had nursed Lance’s child through an illness ending in the girl’s death in her arms in the boarding-house where they were both living. For Alice, Lance would hazard his last hope of earthly happiness. She was to him a thing sacred and apart from his sordid world. When she sought him out, and asked him point-blank whether he had not been employed by her brother, Ashton Carmichael, to transmit certain information to a certain newspaper, the man was fairly staggered.
“Your brother!” he exclaimed. “That poor sycophant, whose pay even I blush to take? He whom we call among ourselves the ‘Little Brother of the Rich.’ Good Lord! You are as far asunder as the poles.”
So Ashton thought, but with a difference!
When Lance understood the case he hastened with almost pathetic eagerness to bring his finished material and lay it in her hands.
“Is this little all I can do for you?” he asked.
“No, Mr. Lance. You might promise me never to put your hand to such vile stuff again,” she said, looking him fearlessly in the face.
“The wording only is my own. He gave me the ideas. He said it would be a stinger to the man he hated most. As for the morality involved, I am past distinguishing between the grades of principle—since she left me, and I see no more of you!”