The papers the next morning announced that Mr. Stuyvesant Carter while taking a short cut through the lower quarter of the city, had been cruelly attacked, beaten and robbed, and had barely escaped with his life.
He was lying in his rooms under the care of a trained nurse, and was recovering as rapidly as could be expected from the shock.
Michael reading it next morning after seeing Sam off to Kansas, lifted his head with that quiet show of indignation. He knew that the message must have been telephoned to the paper by Carter himself shortly after he had escaped from the police. He saw just how easy it was for him to give out any report he chose. Money and influence would buy even the public press. It would be little use to try to refute anything he chose to tell about himself.
The days that followed were to Michael one long blur of trouble. He haunted Mr. Endicott's office in hopes of getting some news of his return but they told him the last letters had been very uncertain. He might come quickly, and he might be delayed a month yet, or even longer; and a cablegram might not reach him much sooner than a letter, as he was travelling from place to place.
After three days of this agony, knowing that the enemy would soon be recovering from his bruises and be about again, he reluctantly wrote a note to Starr: "My dear Miss Endicott: "At the risk of offending you I feel that I must make one more attempt to save you from what I feel cannot but be great misery. The young man of whom we were speaking has twice to my knowledge visited a young woman of the slums within the last month, and has even since your engagement been maintaining an intimacy with her which can be nothing but an insult to you. Though you may not believe me, it gives me greater pain to tell you this than anything I ever had to do before, I have tried in every way I know to communicate with your father, but have thus far failed. I am writing you thus plainly and painfully, hoping that though you will not take my word for it, you will at least be willing to find some trustworthy intimate friend of your family in whom you can confide, who will investigate this matter for you, and give you his candid opinion of the young man. I can furnish such a man with information as to where to go to get the facts. I know that what I have said is true. I beg for the sake of your future happiness that you will take means to discover for yourself.