Violet's hands fell. The voice, she realized, was at least unfamiliar.
"Come on," it wheedled. "I'm all right; I'm from Mr. Dyker."
"What do you want?" she inquired.
"He said Miss Violet would know," came the answer. "He said I would be expected—that it'd be all right if I just told you I came from him."
Violet had not forgotten Katie's warning, but she was unable wholly to doubt the one man that had befriended her. She opened the door.
The pink-and-white young clerk that entered was much embarrassed, and his hostess, in her fever, did not ease him. Nevertheless, after many hesitations on his own part, and more repetitions and explanations made necessary by Violet, he at last convinced her that he did indeed come from Wesley Dyker, and that there was waiting around the corner the cab that would convey her to an office where she could begin the redemption of her pledge.
Almost in a dream, and too ill now much to care what happened to her, she followed the messenger. Dazedly she greeted Dyker in the cab; confusedly she left that conveyance for an office where she answered interminable questions put to her by another young man who, she was told, was an Assistant District Attorney; vaguely she heard Dyker assure this official, as she affixed a signature to an offered paper, that Wesley would himself guarantee her appearance whenever it was required, and when she was at last wheeled back and had climbed the stairs and, alone, fallen again upon Carrie's cot, the only one of recent facts concerning which she was at all certain was that she had said she was a native of Pittsburgh and that her name was Mary Morton.
Katie and Carrie, returning together, found her flushed and babbling nonsense. When they approached her, she did not recognize them, and then, for an hour, they could get from her only the monotonous repetition:
"Don't let them get me! Don't tell them my name!"
It was eight o'clock before the patient, quieted by sympathy and stimulated by whiskey, could be taken to the nearest drugstore, and there, as soon as the experienced druggist set eyes on her, he refused to prescribe.