And so more keenly than ever, because she was more determined than ever, Maggie studied the groups of well-dressed men and women who ate and danced at the Ritzmore, among whom she circulated in her short, smart skirt with her cigarette tray swung from her neck by a broad purple ribbon. Particularly she liked the after-theater crowd, for then only evening wear was permitted in the supper-room and the people were at their liveliest. She liked to watch the famous professional couple do their specialties on the glistening central space with the agile spot-lights always bathing them; and then watch the smartly dressed guests take the floor with the less practiced and more humble steps. Sometime soon she was going to have clothes as smart as any of these. Soon she would be one of these brilliant people, and have a life more exciting than any. Very soon—for her apprenticeship was almost over!

Barney Palmer had these last few months, since he had discovered in Maggie a star who only needed coaching and then an opportunity, made it a practice to come for Maggie occasionally when one o'clock, New York's curfew hour, dispersed the pleasure-seekers and ended Maggie's day of work, or rather her day of intensive schooling for her greater life. On the night of his return from Chicago, which was a week after his break with Larry, Barney reported to take Maggie home. He was in swagger evening clothes and he asked the starter for a taxi; with an almost lordly air and for the service of a white-gloved gesture to a chauffeur, he carelessly handed the starter (who, by the way, was a richer man than Barney) a crisp dollar bill. Barney was trying to make his best impression.

"Seen much of that stiff, Larry Brainard?" he asked when the cab was headed southward.

His tone, which he tried to make merely contemptuous, conveyed the deep wrath which he still felt whenever his mind reverted to Larry. Maggie reserved to herself the privilege of thinking of Larry just as she pleased; but being the kind of girl she was, she could not help being also a bit of a coquette.

"I didn't think he was such a stiff, Barney," she said in an irritatingly pleasant voice. "His prison clothes were bad, but now that he's dressed right I think he looks awfully nice. You and father have always said he looked the perfect swell."

"See here—has he been talking to you?" Barney demanded savagely.

"A little. Yes, several times. In fact he said quite a lot that night after you'd gone."

"What did he say?"

"He said he was not only going to go straight, but"—in her provocative, teasing voice—"he was going to make me go straight."

"What's that? Tell me just what he said!" demanded Barney, his wrath suddenly flaring into furious jealousy.

Maggie told him in detail; in fact told him the scene in greater detail and with a greater length than had been the actuality. Also she censored the scene by omitting her own opposition to Larry's determination. She enjoyed playing with Barney, the exercise of the power she had over Barney's passions.

"And you stood for all that!" cried Barney. By this time they were far down town. "You listen to me, Maggie: What I said to Larry's face that night at the Duchess's still stands. I think he's yellow and has turned against his old pals. I tell you what, I'm going to watch that guy!"

"You won't find it hard to watch him, Barney. Larry never hides himself."

"Oh, I'll watch him all right! And you, Maggie—why, you talk as though you liked that line of talk he gave you!"

"Larry talks well—and I did like it, rather."

"See here! You're not falling for him? You're not going to let him make you go straight?"

Maggie certainly had no intention of letting any such thing come to pass; but she could not check her innocent-toned baiting.

"How do I know what he'll make me do? He's clever and handsome, you know."

Barney gripped her shoulder fiercely. "Maggie—are you falling in love with him?"

"How do I know, when—"

"Maggie!" He gripped her more tightly, and his phrases tumbled out fiercely, rapidly. "You're not going to do anything of the sort! If he goes straight—if you go straight—how can he ever help you? He can't! And it will be your finish—the finish of all the big things we've talked about. Listen: since Larry threw us down, I've taken hold of things and will soon be ready to spring something big. Just a few days now and you'll be out of that dirty street, and you'll be in swell clothes doing swell work—and it will mean the best restaurants, theaters, swell times!"

The car had turned into the narrow, cobbled street and had paused before the Duchess's. Suddenly Barney caught her into his arms.

"And, Maggie, you're going to be mine! We'll have a nifty little place, all right! You know I'm dippy about you....And, Maggie, I don't even want you to go back in there where Larry Brainard is. Let's drive back uptown and start in together now! To-night!"

It was not the fact that he had not suggested marriage which stirred Maggie: men and women in Barney's class lived together, and sometimes they were married and sometimes they were not. It was something else, something of which she was not definitely conscious: but she felt no such momentary thrill, no momentary, dazing surrender, as she had felt the night when Larry had similarly held her.

"Stop that, Barney!" she gasped. "Let me go!" She struggled fiercely, and then tore herself free.

"What's wrong with you?" panted Barney. "You're mine, ain't you?"

"You leave me alone! I'm going to get out!"

She had the door open, and was stepping out when he caught her sleeve. But she pulled so determinedly that to have held her would have meant nothing better than ripping the sleeve out of her coat. So he freed her and followed her across the sidewalk to the Duchess's door.

"What's the idea?" he demanded, choking with fierce jealousy. "It's not Larry, after all? You're not going to let him make you go straight?"

She had recovered her poise, and she replied banteringly:

"As I said, how can I tell what he's going to make me do?"

She heard him draw a deep, quivering breath between clenched teeth; but she could not see how his figure tensed and how his face twisted into a glower.

"Get this, Maggie: Larry Brainard is never going to be able to make you do anything. You get that?"

"Yes, I get it, Barney; good-night," she said lightly.

And Maggie slipped through the door and left Barney trembling in the little street.



CHAPTER IX

Maggie, as she mounted to her room, was hardly conscious of the ring of menace in Barney's voice; but once she was in bed, his tone and his words came back to her and stirred a strange uneasiness in her mind. Barney was angry; Barney was cunning; Barney would stop at nothing to gain his ends. What might be behind his threatening words?

The next morning as she was coming in with milk for her breakfast coffee, she met Larry in the Duchess's room behind the pawnshop. He smilingly planted himself squarely in her way.

"See here, Maggie—aren't you ever going to speak to a fellow?"

Something within her surged up impelling her to tell him of Barney's savage yet unformulated threat. The warning got as far as her tongue, and there halted, struggling.

Her strange, fixed look startled Larry. "Why, what's the matter, Maggie?" he exclaimed.

But her pride, her settled determination to unbend to him in no way and to have no dealings with him, were stronger than her impulse; and the struggling warning remained unuttered.

"Nothing's the matter," she said, and brushed past him and hurried up the stairway.

At times during the day, while tutoring with Mr. Bronson, Larry thought of Maggie's strange look. And his mind was upon it late in the afternoon when he entered the little street. But as he neared his grandmother's house all such thought was banished by Detective Gavegan of the Central Office stepping from the pawnshop and blocking the door with his big figure. There was grim, triumphant purpose on the hard features of Gavegan, conceited by nature and trained to harsh dominance by long rule as a petty autocrat.

"Hello, Gavegan," Larry greeted him pleasantly. "Gee, but you look tickled! Did the Duchess give you a bigger loan than you expected on the Carnegie medal you just hocked?"

"You'll soon be cuttin' out your line of comedy." Gavegan slipped his left arm through Larry's right. "You're comin' along with me, and you'd better come quiet."

Larry stiffened. "Come where?"

"Headquarters."

"I haven't done a thing, Gavegan, and you know it! What do you want me for?"

"Me and the Chief had a little talk about you," leered Gavegan. "And now the Chief wants to have a little personal talk with you. He asked me to round you up and bring you in."

"I've done nothing, and I'll not go!" Larry cried hotly.

"Oh, yes, you will!" Gavegan withdrew his right hand from his coat pocket where it had been resting in readiness. In the hand, its thong about his wrist, was a short leather-covered object filled with lead. "I've got my orders, and you'll come peaceably, or—But I'd just as soon you'd resist, for I owe you something for the punch you slipped over on me the other night."

Larry, taut with the desire to strike, gazed for a moment into the glowering face of the detective. Gavegan, gripping his right arm, with that bone-crushing slug-shot itching for instant use, was apparently master in the present circumstances. But before Larry's quick mind had decided upon a course, the door of the pawnshop opened and closed, and a voice said sharply:

"Nothing doing on that rough stuff, Gavegan!" The speaker was now on Larry's left side, a heavy-faced man in a black derby. "Larry, better be a nice boy and come with us."

"Oh, it's you, Casey!" said Larry. "If you say I've got to go, I'll go—for you're one white copper, even if you do have Gavegan for a partner. Come on. What're we standing here for?"

The trio made their way out of the narrow street, and after some fifteen minutes of walking through the twisting byways of that part of the city, they passed through the granite doorway at Headquarters and entered the office of Deputy Commissioner Barlow, Chief of the Detective Bureau. Barlow was talking over the telephone in a growling staccato, and the three men sat down. After a moment Barlow banged the receiver upon its hook, and turned upon them. He had a clenched, driving face, with small, commanding eyes. It was his boast that he got results, that it was his policy to make people do what you told 'em. He had no other code.

"Well, Brainard," he snapped, "here you are again. What you up to now?"

"Going to try the straight game, Chief," returned Larry.

"Don't try to put that old bunk over on me!"

"It's not bunk, Chief. It's the real stuff."

"Cut it out, I say! Don't you suppose I had a clever bird like you picked up the minute you landed in the city, and have had you covered ever since? And if you are going straight, what about the session you had with Barney Palmer and Old Jimmie Carlisle the very night you blew in? And I'm on to this bluff of your going to that business institute. So come across, Brainard! I've got your every move covered!"

"I've already come across, Chief," replied Larry, trying to keep his temper in the face of the other's bullying manner. "I told Barney and Old Jimmie that I was through with the old game, and through with them as pals at the old game—that's all there was to that meeting. I'm going to that business institute for the same reason that every other person goes there—to learn. That's all there is to the whole business, Chief: I'm going to go straight."

Chief Barlow, hunched forward, his undershot jaw clenched on a cigar stub, regarded Larry steadily with his beady, autocratic eyes. Barlow was trained to penetrate to the inside of men's minds, and he recognized that Larry was in earnest.

"You mean you think you are going to go straight," Barlow remarked slowly and meaningly.

"I know I am going to go straight," Larry returned evenly, meeting squarely the gaze of the Chief of Detectives.

"Do you realize, young man," Barlow continued in the same measured, significant tone, "that whether you go straight, and how you go straight, depends pretty much on me?"

"Mind making that a little clearer, Chief?"

"I'll show you part of my hand—just remember that I'm holding back my high cards. I don't believe you're going to go straight, so we'll start with the proposition that you're not going to run straight and work on from there. You're clever, Brainard—I hand you that; and all the classy crooks trust you. That's why I had picked you out for what I wanted long before you left stir. Brainard, you're wise enough to know that some of our best pinches come from tips handed us from the inside. Brainard"—the slow voice had now become incisive, mandatory—"you're not going to go straight. You're going to string along with Barney and Old Jimmie and the rest of the bunch—we'll protect you—and you're going to slip us tips when something big is about to be pulled off."

Larry, experienced with police methods though he was, could hardly believe this thing which was being proposed to him, Larry Brainard. But he controlled himself.

"If I get you, Chief, you are suggesting that I become a police stool?"

"Exactly. We'll never tip your hand. And any little thing you pull off on your own we'll not bother you about. And, besides, we'll slip you a little dough regular on the quiet."

"And all you want me to do in exchange," Larry asked quietly, "is to hand up my pals?"

"That's all."

Larry found it required his all of strength to control himself; but he did.

"There are only three small objections to your proposition, Chief."

"Yes?"

"The first is, I shall not be a stool."

"What's that?"

"And the second is, I wouldn't squeal on a pal to you even if I were a crook. And the third is what I said in the beginning: I'm not going to be a crook."

Barlow's squat, powerful figure arose menacingly. Casey also stood up.

"I tell you you ARE going to be a crook!" Barlow's big fist crashed down on his desk in a tremendous exclamation point. "And you're going to work for me exactly as I tell you!"

"I have already given you my final word," said Larry.

"You—you—" Barlow almost choked at this quiet defiance. His face turned red, his breath came in a fluttering snarl, his powerful shoulders hunched up as if he were about to strike. But he held back his physical blows.

"That's your ultimatum?"

"If you care to call it so—yes."

"Then here's mine! I told you I was holding back my high cards. Either you do as I say, and work with Gavegan and Casey, or you'll not be able to hold a job in New York! My men will see to that. And here's another high card. You do as I've said, or I'll hang some charge on you, one that'll stick, and back up the river you'll go for another stretch! There's an ultimatum for you to think about!"

It certainly was. Larry gazed into the harsh, glaring face, set in fierce determination. He knew that Barlow, as part of his policy, loved to break down the spirit of criminals; and he knew that nothing so roused Barlow as opposition from a man he considered in his power. Close beside the Chief he saw the gloating, malignant face of Gavegan; Casey, who had been restless since the beginning of the scene, had moved to the window and was gazing down into Center Street.

For a moment Larry did not reply. Barlow mistook Larry's silence for wavering, or the beginning of an inclination to yield.

"You turn that over in your noodle," Barlow drove on. "You're going to go crooked, anyhow, so you might as well go crooked in the only way that's safe for you. I'm going to have Gavegan and Casey watch you, and if in the next few days you don't begin to string along with Barney and Old Jimmie and that bunch, and if you don't get me word that your answer to my proposition is 'yes,' hell's going to fall on you! Now get out of here!"

Larry got out. He was liquid lava of rage inside; but he had had enough to do with police power to know that it would help him not at all to permit an eruption against a police official while he was in the very heart of the police stronghold.

He walked back toward his own street in a fury, beneath which was subconsciously an element of uneasiness: an uneasiness which would have been instantly roused to caution had he known that Barney Palmer had this hour and more been following him in a taxicab, and that across the street from the car's window Barney's sharp face had watched him enter Police Headquarters and had watched him emerge.

Home reached, Larry briefly recounted his experience at Headquarters to Hunt and the Duchess. The painter whistled; the Duchess blinked and said nothing at all.

"Maggie was more right than she knew when she first said you were facing a tough proposition!" exclaimed Hunt. "Believe me, young fellow, you're certainly up against it!"

"Can you beat it for irony!" said Larry, pacing the floor. "A man wants to go straight. His pals ask him to be a crook, and are sore because he won't be a crook. The police ask him to be a crook, and threaten him because he doesn't want to be a crook. Some situation!"

"Some situation!" repeated Hunt. "What're you going to do?"

"Do?" Larry halted, his face set with defiant determination. "I'm going to keep on doing exactly what I've been doing! And they can all go to hell!"



CHAPTER X

For several days nothing seemed to be happening, though Larry had a sense that unknown forces were gathering on distant isothermal lines and bad weather was bearing down upon him. During these days, trying to ignore that formless trouble, he gave himself with a most rigid determination to his new routine—the routine which he counted on to help him into the way of great things.

Every day he saw Maggie; sometimes he was in her company for an hour or more. He had the natural hunger of a young man to talk to a young woman; and, moreover, it is a severe strain for a man to be living under the same roof with the girl he loves and not to be on terms of friendship with her. But Maggie maintained her aloofness. She spoke only when she was pressed into it, and her speech was usually no more than a "yes" or a "no," or a flashing phrase of disdain.

At times Larry had the feeling that, for all her repression, Maggie would have been glad to be more free with him. And he knew enough of human nature not to be too disheartened by her attitude. Had he been a nonentity to her, she would have ignored him. Her very insults were proof that he was a positive personality with real significance in her life. And so he counseled himself to have patience and await a thawing or an awaking. Besides, he kept repeating to himself, there would be small chance of effecting a conversion in this militant young orthodoxist of cynicism until he had proved the soundness of contrary views by his own established success.

And thus the days drifted by. But on the fifth day after his interview with Barlow things began to happen. First of all, he noticed in a morning paper that Red Hannigan and Jack Rosenfeldt, members of his old outfit and suggested by Old Jimmie as participants in his proposed new enterprise, had just been arrested by Gavegan and Casey on the charge of alleged connection with the sale of fraudulent mining stock.

Second, on his return at the end of the afternoon, he saw standing before the house a taxicab with a trunk beside the chauffeur. In the musty museum of a room behind the pawnshop he found Hunt and the Duchess and Old Jimmie and Barney; and also Maggie, coming down the stairway, hat and coat on and carrying a suitcase. A sharp pain throbbed through him as he recognized the significance of Maggie's hat and coat and baggage.

"Maggie—you're going away?" he exclaimed.

"Yes."

She had paused at the foot of the stairway, and at sight of him had gone a little pale and wide-eyed. But in an instant she had recovered her accustomed flair; there came a proud lift to her head, a flash of scorn into her dark eyes.

"At last I'm leaving this street for good," she said. "I told you that some day I was going out into the world and do big things. The time's come—I'm graduated—I'm going to begin real work. And I'm going to succeed—you see!"

"Maggie!" he breathed. Then impulsively he started toward her authoritatively. "Maggie, I'm not going to let you do anything of the sort!"

But swiftly Barney had stepped in between them, Old Jimmie just behind him.

"Keep out of this!" Barney snapped at Larry, a reddish blaze in his eyes. "Maggie's going away and you can't stop her. D'you think her father is going to let her stay down here any longer, where you can spout your preaching at her!—and you all the time a stool and a squealer!"

"What's that?" cried Larry.

"I called you a stool!" repeated the malignantly exultant Barney, alert for any move on the part of the suddenly tensed Larry. "And you are a stool! Didn't I see you myself go into Headquarters with Casey and Gavegan where you sold yourself to Chief Barlow!"

"Why, you damned—"

Even before he spoke Larry launched a furious swing straight from the hip at Barney's twisted face. But Barney had been expecting exactly that, and was even the quicker. He caught Larry's wrist before it was fairly started, and thrust a dull-hued automatic into Larry's stomach.

"Behave; damn you," gritted Barney, "or I'll blow your damned guts out! No—go ahead and try to hit me. I'd like nothing better than to kill you, you rat, and have a good plea of self-defense!"

Larry let his hands unclench and fall to his sides. "You've got the drop on me, Barney—but you're a liar."

"You bet I got the drop on you! And not only with my gun. I've got it on you about being a stool. Everybody knows you are a stool. And what's more, they know you are a squealer!"

"A squealer!" Larry stiffened again.

"A stool and a squealer!" Barney fairly hurled at Larry these two most despised epithets of his world. "You've done your job swell as a stool, and squealed on Red Hannigan and Jack Rosenfeldt and turned them up for the police!"

"You believe I had anything to do with their arrest?" exclaimed Larry.

Barney laughed in his derision.

"Of course we believe it," put in Old Jimmie, his seamed, cunning face now ruthlessly hard. "And what's more, we know it!"

"And what's still more," Barney taunted, "Maggie believes it, too!"

Larry turned to Maggie. Her face was now drawn, with staring eyes.

"Maggie—do you believe it?" he demanded.

For a moment she neither spoke nor moved. Then slowly she nodded.

"But, Maggie," he protested, "I didn't do it! Barlow did ask me to be a stool, but I turned him down! Aside from that, I know no more of this than you do!"

"Of course you'd deny it—we were waiting for that," sneered Barney. "Jimmie, we've wasted enough time here. Take Maggie's bag and let's be moving on."

Old Jimmie picked up Maggie's suitcase, and slipping a hand through her arm led her across the room. She did not even say good-bye to Hunt or the Duchess, or even glance at them; but went out silently, her drawn, staring look on Larry alone.

Barney backed after them, his automatic still held in readiness. "I'm letting you down damned easy, Brainard," he said, hate glittering in his eyes. "But there's some who won't be so nice!"

With that he closed the door. Until that moment both Hunt and the Duchess had said nothing. Now the Duchess spoke up:

"I'm glad they've taken Maggie away, Larry. I've seen the way you've come to feel about her, and she's not the right sort for you."

But Larry was still too dazed by the way in which Maggie had walked out of his life to make any response.

"But there's a lot in what Barney said about there being some who wouldn't be easy on you," continued the Duchess. "That word had been brought me before Barney showed up. So I had this ready for you."

From a slit pocket in her baggy skirt the Duchess drew out a pistol and handed it to Larry.

"What's this for?" Larry asked.

"I was told that word had gone out to the Ginger Buck Gang to get you," answered the Duchess. "Barney has some secret connection with the Ginger Bucks. His saying that you were a stool and a squealer is not the only thing he's got against you; he's jealous of you on account of everything—especially Maggie. So you'll need that gun."

"What's this I've fallen into the middle of?" exclaimed Hunt. "A Kentucky feud?"

"It's very easy to understand when you know the code," Larry explained grimly. "Down here when an outfit thinks one of its members has squealed on them, it's their duty to be always on the watch for their chance to finish him off. I'm to be finished off—that's all."

"Say, young fellow, the life of a straight crook doesn't seem to be getting much simpler! Why, man, you hardly dare to stir from the house! What are you going to do?"

"Going to go around my business, always with the pleasant anticipation of a bullet in my back when some fellow thinks it safe for him to shoot."

The three of them discussed this latest development over their dinner, which they had together up in Hunt's studio. But despite all their talk of his danger, a very real and near danger, Larry's mind was more upon Maggie who had thus suddenly been wrenched out of his life. He remembered her excited, boastful talk of their first evening. Her period of schooling was indeed now over; she was now committed to her rosily imagined adventure, in which she saw herself as a splendid lady. And with Barney Palmer as her guiding influence!...

Dinner had been finished and Hunt was trying to give Larry such cheer as "Buck up, young fellow—you know the worst—there's nothing else that can happen," when the lie direct was given to his phrases by heavy steps running up the stairway and the opening and closing of the door. There stood Officer Casey, heaving for breath.

Instinctively Larry drew his pistol. "Casey! What're you here for?"

"Get rid of that gat—don't be found with a gun on," ordered Casey. "And beat it. You've got less than five minutes to make your get-away."

"My get-away! What's up?"

"You haven't come across as the Chief ordered you to, and he's out to give you just what he said he would," Casey said rapidly, his speech broken by panting. "There's been a stick-up, with assault that may be changed to attempted manslaughter, and the Chief has three men who swear you're the guilty party. It's a sure-fire case against you, Larry—and it'll mean five to ten years if you're caught. Gavegan and I got the order to arrest you. I've beat Gavegan to it so's to tip you off, but he's only a few minutes behind. Hurry, Larry! Only—only—"

Casey paused, gasping for his wind.

"Only what, Casey?"

"Only alibi me, Larry, by slipping over a haymaker on me like you did on Gavegan. So's I can say I tried to get you, but you were too quick and knocked me cold. Quick! Only not too hard—I know how to play possum."

Larry handed the pistol to Hunt. "Casey, you're a real scout! Thanks!" He grasped Casey's hand, then swiftly relaxed his grip. "Ready?"

"Fire," said Casey.

Larry held his open left hand close to Casey's jaw, and drove his right fist into his palm with a thudding smack. Casey went sprawling to the floor, and lay there loosely, with mouth agape, in perfect simulation of a man who has been knocked out.

Larry turned quickly. "You two will testify that I beat Casey up and then made my escape?"

"Sure, I'll testify to anything for the sake of a good old goat like Casey!" cried Hunt. "But hurry, boy—beat it!"

The Duchess held out Larry's hat to him, and thrust into his coat pocket a roll of bills which had come from her capacious skirt. "Hurry, Larry—and be careful—for you're all I've got."

Impulsively Larry stooped and kissed the thin, shriveled lips of his grandmother—the first kiss he had ever given her. Then he turned and ran down the stairway, Hunt just behind him. He turned out the light in the back room, and called to Old Isaac to darken the pawnshop proper. He was going forth with two forces in arms against him, the police and his pals, and he had no desire to be a shining mark for either or both by stepping through a lighted doorway.

"Larry, my son, you're all right!" said Hunt, gripping his hand in the darkness. "Listen, boy: if ever you're trapped and can get to a telephone, call Plaza nine-double-o-one and say 'Benvenuto Cellini.'"

"All right."

"Remember, you're to say 'Benvenuto Cellini,' and the telephone is Plaza nine-double-o-one. Luck to you!" Again they gripped hands. Then Larry slipped through the darkened doorway into whatever might lie beyond.



CHAPTER XI

A misting rain was being swirled about by a temperish wind as Larry came out into the little street. Down toward the river the one gaslight glowed faintly like an expiring nebula; all the little shops were closed; home lights gleamed behind the curtained windows which the storm had closed; so that the street was now a little canyon of uncertain shadows.

Larry had not needed to think to know that Gavegan would be making his vindictive approach from the westerly regions where lay Headquarters. So, keeping in the deeper shadows close to the building, Larry took the eastern course of the street, remembering in a flash a skiff he had seen tethered to a scow moored to the pier which stretched like a pointer finger from the little Square. As yet he had no plan beyond the necessity of the present moment, which was flight. Could he but make that skiff unseen and cast off, he would have time, in the brief sanctuary which the black river would afford him, to formulate the wisest procedure his predicament permitted him.

As he came near that smothered glow-worm of a street-lamp it assumed for him the betraying glare of a huge spot-light. But it had to be passed to gain the skiff; and with collar turned up and hat-brim pulled down and head hunched low, he entered the dim sphere of betrayal, walked under its penny's-worth of flame, and glided toward the shadows beyond, his eyes straining with the preternatural keenness of the hunted at every stoop and doorway before him.

He was just passing out of the sphere of mist-light—the lamp being now at his back helped him—when he saw three vague figures lurking half a dozen paces ahead of him. His brain registered these vague figures with the instantaneity of a snapshot camera at full noon. They were mere shadows; but the farther of the three seemed to be Barney Palmer—he was not sure; but of the identity of the other two there was no doubt: "Little Mick" and "Lefty Ed," both members high in the councils of the Ginger Bucks, and either of whose services as a killer could be purchased for a hundred dollars or a paper of cocaine, depending upon which at the moment there was felt the greater need.

In the very instant that he saw, Larry doubled about and ran at full speed back up the street. Two shots rang out; Larry could not tell whether they were fired by Little Mick or Lefty Ed or Barney Palmer—that is, if the third man really were Barney. Again two shots were fired, then came the sound of pursuing feet. Luckily not one of the bullets had touched Larry; for the New York professional gunman is the premier bad shot of all the world, and cannot count upon his marksmanship, unless he can get his weapon solidly anchored against his man, or can sneak around to the rear and pot his unsuspecting victim in the back.

As Larry neared the pawnshop with the intention of making his escape through the western stretch of the street, he saw that Old Isaac has switched on the lights; and he also saw Officer Gavegan bearing down in his direction. They sighted each other in the same instant, and Gavegan let out a roar and started for him.

Caught between two opposing forces, Larry again had no time to plan. Rather, there was nothing he could plan, for only one way was open to him. He dashed into the pawnshop and into the back room. At the Duchess's desk Hunt was scribbling at furious speed.

"I'm caught, Hunt—Gavegan's coming," he gasped, and ran up the stairs, Hunt following and stuffing his scribblings into a pocket. As Larry passed the open studio door he saw Casey sitting up. "Down on the floor with you, Casey! Hunt, work over him to bring him to—and stall Gavegan for a while if you can."

With that Larry sprang to a ladder at the end of the little hall, ran up it, unhooked and pushed up the trap, scrambled through upon the roof, and pushed the trap back into place.

Fortune, or rather the well-wishing wits of friends below, gave Larry a few precious moments more than he had counted on. He was barely out on the rain-greased tin roof, with the trap down, when Gavegan came thumping up the stairs and into the studio. At sight of the recumbent Casey, head limply on Hunt's knees, and his loose face being laved by a wet towel in Hunt's hands, Gavegan let out another roar:

"Hell's bells! What the hell's this mean?"

"I tried to nab Brainard," Casey mumbled feebly, "and he knocked me out cold—the same as he did you, Gavegan."

"Hell!" snorted Gavegan, his wrath increased by this reference. "You there"—to Hunt and the Duchess—"where'd Brainard go? He's in this house some place!"

"I don't know," said Hunt.

"Yes, you do! Leave that boob side-kick of mine sleep it off, and help me find Brainard or you'll feel my boot!"

The big painter stood up facing the big detective and his left hand gripped the latter's wrist and his right closed upon the detective's throat just as it had closed upon the lean throat of Old Jimmie on the day of Larry's return—only now there was nothing playful in the noose of that big hand. He shook Gavegan as he might have shaken a pillow, with a thumb thrusting painfully in beneath Gavegan's ear.

"I've done nothing, and that bully stuff doesn't go with me!" he fairly spat into Gavegan's face. "You talk to me like a gentleman and apologize, or I'll throw you out of the window and let your head bounce off one of its brother cobblestones below!"

Gavegan choked out an apology, whereat Hunt flung him from him. The detective, glowering at the other, pulled aside curtains, peered into corners; then made furious and fruitless search of the rooms below, bringing up at last at Maggie's door, which the Duchess had slipped ahead of him and locked. When he demanded the key, the Duchess told him of Maggie's departure and her carrying the key with her. It was a solid door, with strong lock and hinges; and two minutes of Gavegan's battering shoulders were required to make it yield entrance. Not till he found the room empty did Gavegan think of the trap and the roof.

Larry made good use of these few extra minutes granted him. Whatever he was to do he realized he must do it quickly. Not for long would the forces arrayed against him be small in number; Gavegan, though beaten at the outset, would send out an alarm that would arouse the police of the city—and in their own degree the gangsters would do the same. During his weeks of freedom Larry had unconsciously studied the layout of the neighborhood, his old instincts at work. The subconscious knowledge thus gained was of instant value. He hurried along the slippery roofs, taking care not to trip over the dividing walls, and came to the rear edge of a roof where he had marked a fire-escape with an unusually broad upper landing. He could discern the faint outlines of this; and hanging to the gutter he dropped to the fire-escape, and a moment later he was down in the back yard; and yet two moments later he was over two fences and going through a rabbit's burrow of a passageway that went beneath a house into the street behind his own.

He did not pause to reconnoiter. Time was of the essence of his safety, risks had to be taken. He plunged out of his hole—around the first corner—around the next—and thus wove in and out, working westward, till at last, on turning a corner into a lighted street, he saw possible relief in two stray taxicabs before a little East Side restaurant, one of which was just leaving.

"Taxi!" he called breathlessly.

The chauffeur of the moving car swung back beside the curb and opened the door. But even as he started to enter he saw Little Mick and Lefty Ed turn into the street behind him. However, the brightness of this street ill-accorded with the anonymity with which their art is most safely and profitably practiced, so Larry got in without a bullet flicking at him.

"Forty-Second Street and Broadway," he called to the chauffeur as he closed the door.

The car started off. Looking back through the little window he saw Lefty Ed enter the other taxicab, and saw Little Mick standing on the curb. He understood. Little Mick was to send out the alarm, while Lefty was to follow the trail.

Let Lefty follow. At least Larry now had a few minutes to consider some plan which should look beyond the safety of the immediate moment. He was well-dressed, albeit somewhat wet and soiled; he had money in his pockets. What should he do?

Yes, what should he do? The more he considered it the more ineluctable did his situation become. By now Gavegan had sent out his alarm; within a few moments every policeman on duty would have instructions to watch for him. He might escape for the time, at least, these allies of his one-time pals by going to a hotel and taking a room there; but to walk into a hotel would be to walk into arrest. On the other hand, he might evade the police if he sought refuge in one of his old haunts, or perhaps with old Bronson; but then his angered pals knew of these haunts, and to enter one of them would be to offer himself freely to their vengeance.

There were other cities—but then how was he to get to them? He saw Manhattan for what it was to a man who was a fugitive from justice and injustice: an island, a trap, with only a few outlets and inlets for its millions: two railway stations—a few ferries—a few bridges—a few tunnels: and at every one of them policemen watching for him. He could not leave New York. And yet how in God's name was he to stay here?

He thought of Maggie. So she wanted the life of dazzling, excitement, of brilliant adventure, did she? He wondered how she would like a little of the real thing—such as this?

As he neared Forty-Second Street he still was without definite plan which would guarantee him safety, and there was Lefty hanging on doggedly. An idea came which would at least extend his respite and give him more time for thought. He opened the door of his cab and thrust a ten-dollar note into the instinctively ready hand of his driver.

"Keep the change—and give me a swing once around Central Park, slowing down on those hilly turns on the west side."

"I gotcha."

The car entered the park at the Plaza and sped up the shining, almost empty drive. Larry kept watch, now on the trailing Lefty, now on the best chance for execution of his idea—all the way up the east side and around the turn at the north end. As the car, now south-bound, swung up the hill near One Hundred and Fifth Street, at whose crest there is a sharp curve with thick-growing, overhanging trees, Larry opened the right door and said:

"Show me a little speed, driver, as soon as you pass this curve!"

"I gotcha," replied the chauffeur.

The slowing car hugged the inside of the sharp turn, Larry holding the door open and waiting his moment. The instant the taxi made the curve Lefty's car was cut from view; and that instant Larry sprang from the running-board, slamming the door behind him, landed on soft earth and scuttled in among the trees. Crouching in the shadows he saw his car speed away as per his orders, and the moment after he saw Lefty's car, evidently taken by surprise by this obvious attempt at escape, leap forward in hot pursuit.

Larry slipped farther in among the trees and sat down, his back against a tree. This was better. For the time he was safe.

He drew a long breath. Then for a moment what he had just been through this last hour came back to him in an almost amusing light: as something grotesquely impossible—much like those helter-skelter, utterly unreal chases which, with slight variations of personalities and costumes, were the chief plots for the motion-picture drama in its crude childhood. But though there seemed a likeness, there was a tremendous difference. For this was real! Every one was in earnest!

Again he thought of Maggie. What would she think, what would be her attitude, if she knew the truth about him?—the truth about those she had gone with and the life she had gone into? Would she be inclined toward HIM, would she help him?...

Again he thought of what he should do. Now that he commanded a composure which had not been his during the stress of his flight, he examined every aspect with greater care. But the conclusions of composure were the same as those of excitement. He could not gain entrance to one of the great hotels and remain in his room, unidentified among its thousands of strangers; he could not find asylum in one of his old haunts; he dared not try to leave Manhattan. He was a prisoner, whose only privilege was a larger but most uncertain liberty.

And that liberty was becoming penetratingly uncomfortable. An hour had passed, the ground on which he sat was wet and cold, and the misty air was assuming a distressing kinship with departed winter and was making shivering assaults upon his bones. At the best, he realized, he could not hope to remain secure in this cultivated wilderness beyond daylight. With the coming of morning he would certainly be the prey of either his pals or the police. And if they did not beat him from his hiding, plain mortal hunger would drive him out into the open streets. If he was to do anything at all, he must do it while he still had the moderate protection of the night.

And then for the first time there came to him remembrance of Hunt's rapid injunction, given him in the hurly-burly of escape when no thoughts could impress the upper surface of his mind save those of the immediate moment. "If you're trapped, call Plaza nine-double-o-one and say 'Benvenuto Cellini.'"

Larry had no idea what that swift instruction might be about. And the chance seemed a slender, fantastical one, even if he could safely get to a public telephone. But it seemed his only chance.

He arose, and, keeping as much as he could to the wilder regions of the park, and making the utmost use of shadows when he had to cross a path or a drive, he stole southward. He remembered a drug-store at Eighty-Fourth Street and Columbus Avenue, peculiarly suited to his purpose, for it had a side entrance on Eighty-Fourth Street and was in a neighborhood where policemen were infrequent.

Fortune favored him. At length he reached Eighty-Fourth Street and peered over the wall. Central Park West was practically empty of automobiles, for the theaters had not yet discharged their crowds and no policeman was in sight. He vaulted the wall; a minute later he was in a booth in the drug-store, had dropped his nickel in the slot, and was asking for Plaza nine-double-o-one.

"Hello, sir!" responded the very correct voice of a man.

"Benvenuto Cellini," said Larry.

"Hold the wire, sir," said the voice.

Larry held the wire, wondering. After a moment the same correct voice asked where Larry was speaking from. Larry gave the exact information.

"Stay right in the booth, and keep on talking; say anything you like; the wire here will be kept open," continued the voice. "We'll not keep you waiting long, sir."

The voice ceased. Larry began to chat about topics of the day, about invented friends and engagements, well knowing that his stream of talk was not being heard unless Central was "listening in"; and knowing also that, to any one looking into the glass door of his booth, he was giving a most unsuspicious appearance of a busy man. And while he talked, his wonder grew. What was about to happen? What was this Benvenuto Cellini business all about?

He had been talking for fifteen minutes or more when the glass door of the booth was opened from without and a man's voice remarked:

"When you are through, sir, we will be going."

The voice was the same he had heard over the wire. Larry hung up and followed the man out the side door, noting only that he had a lean, respectful face. At the curb stood a limousine, the door of which was opened by the man for Larry. Larry stepped in.

"Are you followed, sir?" inquired the man.

"I don't know."

"We'd better make certain. If you are, we'll lose them, sir. We'll stop somewhere and change our license plates again."

Instead of getting into the unlighted body with him, as Larry had expected, the man closed the door, mounted to the seat beside the chauffeur, and the car shot west and turned up Riverside Drive.

One may break the speed laws in New York if one has the speed, and if one has the ability to get away with it. This car had both. Never before had Larry driven so rapidly within New York City limits; he knew this, that any trailing taxicab would be lost behind. At Two-Hundred-and-Forty-Fifth Street the car swung into Van Cortland Park, and switched off all lights. Two minutes later they halted in a dark stretch of one of the by-roads of the Park.

"We'll be stopping only a minute, sir, to put on our right number plates," the man opened the door to explain.

Within the minute they were away again, now proceeding more leisurely, in the easy manner of a private car going about its private business—though the interior of the car was discreetly dark and Larry huddled discreetly into a corner. Thus they drove over the Grand Boulevards and recrossed the Harlem River and presently drew up in front of a great apartment house in Park Avenue.

The man opened the door. "Walk right in, sir, as though you belong here. The doorman and the elevatorman are prepared."

They might be prepared, but Larry certainly was not; and he shot up the elevator to the top floor with mounting bewilderment. The man unlocked the door of an apartment, ushered Larry in, took his wet hat, then ushered the dazed Larry through the corner of a dim-lit drawing-room and through another door.

"You are to wait here, sir," said the man, and quietly withdrew.

Larry looked about him. He took in but a few details, but he knew enough about the better fittings of life to realize that he was in the presence of both money and the best of taste. He noted the log fire in the broad fireplace, comfortable chairs, the imported rugs on the gleaming floor, the shelves of books which climbed to the ceiling, a quaint writing-desk in one corner which seemed to belong to another country and another century, but which was perfectly at home in this room.

On the desk he saw standing a leather-framed photograph which seemed familiar. He crossed and picked it up. Indeed it was familiar! It was a photograph of Hunt: of Hunt, not in the shabby, shapeless garments he wore down at the Duchess's, but Hunt accoutered as might be a man accustomed to such a room as this—though in this picture there was the same strong chin, the same belligerent good-natured eyes.

Now how and where did that impecunious, rough-neck painter fit into—

But the dazed question Larry was asking was interrupted by a voice from the door—the thick voice of a man:

"Who the hell 'r' you?"

Larry whirled about. In the doorway stood a tall, bellicose young gentleman of perhaps twenty-four or five, in evening dress, flushed of face, holding unsteadily to the door-jamb.

"I beg your pardon," said Larry.

"'N' what the hell you doin' here?" continued the belligerent young gentleman.

"I'd be obliged to you if you could tell me," said Larry.

"Tryin' to stall, 'r' you," declared the young gentleman with a scowling profundity. "No go. Got to come out your corner 'n' fight. 'N' I'm goin' lick you."

The young man crossed unsteadily to Larry and took a fighting pose.

"Put 'em up!" he ordered.

This was certainly a night of strange adventure, thought Larry. His wild escape—his coming to this unknown place—and now this befuddled young fellow intent upon battle with him.

"Let's fight to-morrow," Larry suggested soothingly.

"Put 'em up!" ordered the other. "If you don't know what you're doin' here, I'll show you what you're doin' here!"

But he was not to show Larry, for while he was uttering his last words, trying to steady himself in a crouch for the delivery of a blow, a voice sounded sharply from the doorway—a woman's voice:

"Dick!"

The young man slowly turned. But Larry had seen her first. He had no chance to take her in, that first moment, beyond noting that she was slender and young and exquisitely gowned, for she swept straight across to them.

"Dick, you're drunk again!" she exclaimed.

"Wrong, sis," he corrected in an injured tone. "It's same drunk."

"Dick, you go to bed!"

"Now, sis—"

"You go to bed!"

The young man wavered before her commanding gaze. "Jus's you say—jus's you say," he mumbled, and went unsteadily toward the door.

The young woman watched him out, and then turned her troubled face back to Larry. "I'm sorry Dick behaved to you as he did."

And then before Larry could make answer, her clouded look was gone. "So you're here at last, Mr. Brainard." She held her hand out, smiling a smile that by some magic seemed to envelop him within an immediate friendship.

"I'm Miss Sherwood." He noted that the slender, tapering hand had almost a man's strength of grip. "You needn't tell me anything about yourself," she added, "for I already know a lot—all I need to know: about you—and about Maggie Carlisle. You see an hour ago a messenger brought me a long letter he'd written about you." And she nodded to the photograph Larry was still holding.

"You—you know him?" Larry stammered.

She answered with a whimsical smile: "Yes. Isn't he a grand, foolish old dear? He's such a roistering, bragging personage that I've named him Benvenuto Cellini—though he's neither liar nor thief. He must have told you what I called him."

So that explained this password of "Benvenuto Cellini"! "No, he didn't explain anything. There was no time."

"I don't know where he is," she continued; "please don't tell me. I don't want to know until he wants me to know."

Larry had been making a swift appraisal of her. She was perhaps thirty, fair, with golden-brown hair held in place by a large comb of wrought gold, with violet-blue eyes, wearing a low-cut gown of violet chiffon velvet and dull gold shoes. Larry's instinct told him that here was a patrician, a thoroughbred: with poise, with a knowledge of the world, with whimsical humor, with a kindly understanding of people, with steel in her, and with a smiling readiness for almost any situation.

"I think no one will find you—at least for the present," her pleasantly modulated voice continued. "There are so many things I want to talk over with you. Perhaps I can help about Maggie. I hope you don't mind my talking about her." Larry could not imagine any one taking offense at anything this brilliant apparition might possibly say. "But we'll put off our talk until to-morrow. It's late, and you're wet and cold, and besides, my aunt is having one of her bad spells and thinks she needs me. Judkins will see to you. Good-night."

"Good-night," said Larry.

She moved gracefully out—almost floated, Larry would have said. The next moment the man was with him who had been his escort here, and led Larry into a spacious bedroom with bath attached. Ten minutes later Judkins made his exit, carrying Larry's outer clothes; and another ten minutes later, after a hot bath, and garbed in silk pajamas which Judkins had produced, Larry was in the softest and freshest bed that had ever held him.

But sleep did not come to Larry for a long time. He lay wondering about this golden-haired, poiseful Miss Sherwood. She was undoubtedly the woman in the back of Hunt's life. And he wondered about Hunt—who he really was—what had really driven him into this strange exile. And he wondered about Maggie—what she might be doing—what from this strange new vantage-point he might do for her and with her. And he wondered how his own complex situation was going to work itself out.

And still wondering, Larry at length fell asleep.



CHAPTER XII

When Larry awoke the next morning, he blinked for several bewildered moments about his bedroom, so unlike his cell at Sing Sing and so unlike Hunt's helter-skelter studio down at the Duchess's which he had shared, before he realized that this big, airy chamber and this miracle of a bed on which he lay were realities and not a mere continuation of a dream of fantastic and body-flattering wealth.

Then his mind turned back a page in the book of his life and he lay considering the events of the previous evening: the scene with Barney and Old Jimmie and Maggie, their all denouncing him as a police stool-pigeon and a squealer, and Maggie's defiant departure to begin her long-dreamed-of career as a leading-woman and perhaps star in what she saw as great and thrilling adventures; his own enforced and frenzied flight; his strange method of reaching this splendid apartment; his meeting with the handsome, drink-befuddled young man in evening clothes; his meeting with the exquisitely gowned patrician Miss Sherwood, who had received him with the poise and frank friendliness of a democratic queen, and had immediately ordered him off to bed.

Strange, all of these things! But they were all realities. And in this new set of circumstances which had come into being in a night, what was he to do?

He recalled that Miss Sherwood had said that she and he would have their talk that morning. He pulled his watch from under his pillow. It was past nine o'clock. He looked about him for clothes, but saw only a bathrobe. Then he remembered Judkins carrying off his rain-soaked garments, with "Ring for me when you wake up, sir."

Larry found an electric bell button dangling over the top of his bed by a silken cord. He pushed the button and waited. Within two minutes the door opened, and Judkins entered, laden with fresh garments.

"Good-morning, sir," said Judkins. "Your own clothes, and some shirts and other things I've borrowed from Mr. Dick. How will you have your bath, sir—hot or cold?"

"Cold," said the bewildered Larry.

Judkins disappeared into the great white-tiled bathroom, there was the rush of splashing water for a few moments, then silence, and Judkins reappeared.

"Your bath is ready, sir. I've laid out some of Mr. Dick's razors. How soon shall I bring you in your breakfast?"

"In about twenty minutes," said Larry.

Exactly twenty minutes later Judkins carried in a tray, and set it on a table beside a window looking down into Park Avenue. "Miss Sherwood asked me to tell you she would see you in the library at ten o'clock, sir—where she saw you last night," said Judkins, and noiselessly was gone.

Freshly shaven, tingling from his bath, with a sense of being garbed flawlessly, though in garments partly alien, Larry addressed himself to the breakfast of grapefruit, omelette, toast and coffee, served on Sevres china with covers of old silver. In his more prosperous eras Larry had enjoyed the best private service that the best hotels in New York had to sell; but their best had been coarse and slovenly compared to this. He would eat for a minute or two—then get up and look at his carefully dressed self in the full-length mirror—then gaze from his high, exclusive window down into Park Avenue with its stream of cars comfortably carrying their occupants toward ten o'clock jobs in Wall or Broad Streets—and then he would return to his breakfast. This was amazing—bewildering!

He was toward the end of his omelette when a knock sounded at his door. Thinking Judkins had returned, he called, "Come in"; but instead of Judkins the opening door admitted the belligerent young man in rumpled evening clothes of the previous night. Now he wore a silk dressing-gown of a flamboyant peacock blue, his feet showed bare in toe slippers, his wavy, yellowish hair had the tousled effect of a very recent separation from a pillow. A cigarette depended from the corner of his mouth.

Larry started to rise. But the young man arrested the motion with a gesture of mock imperativeness.

"Keep your seat, fair sir; I would fain have speech with thee." He crossed and sat on a corner of Larry's table, one slippered foot dangling, and looked Larry over with an appraising eye. "Permit me to remark, sir," he continued in his grand manner, "that you look as though you might be some one."

"Is that what you wanted to tell me, Mr. Sherwood?" queried Larry.

The other's grand manner vanished and he grinned. "Forget the 'Mr. Sherwood,' or you'll make me feel not at home in my own house," he begged with humorous mournfulness. "Call me Dick. Everybody else does. That's settled. Now to the reason for this visitation at such an ungodly hour. Sis has just been in picking on me. Says I was rude to you last night. I suppose I was. I'd had several from my private stock early in the evening; and several more around in jovial Manhattan joints where prohibition hasn't checked the flow of happiness if you know the countersign. The cumulative effect you saw, and were the victim of. I apologize, sir."

"That's all right, Mr.—"

"Dick is what I said," interrupted the other.

"Dick, then. It's all right. I understand."

"Thanks. I'll call you Old Captain Nemo for short. Sis didn't tell me your name or anything about you, and she said I wasn't to ask you questions. But whatever Isabel does is usually one hundred percent right. She said I'd probably be seeing a lot of you, so I'll introduce myself. You'd learn all about me from some one else, anyhow, so you might as well learn about me from me and get an impartial and unbiased statement. Clever of me, ain't it, to beat 'em to it?"

Larry found himself smiling back into the ingratiating, irresponsible, boyish face. "I suppose so."

"I'll shoot you the whole works at once. Name, Richard Livingston Sherwood. Years, twenty-four, but alleged not yet to have reached the age of discretion. One of our young flying heroes who helped save France and make the world safe for something or other by flapping his wings over the endless alkali of Texas. Occupation, gentleman farmer."

"You a farmer!" exclaimed Larry.

"A gentleman farmer," corrected Dick. "The difference between a farmer and a gentleman farmer, Captain Nemo, is that a gentleman farmer makes no profit on his crops. Now my friends say I'm losing an awful lot of money and am sowing an awfully big crop. And according to them, instead of practicing sensible crop rotation, I'm a foolish one-crop farmer—and my one crop is wild oats."

"I see," said Larry.

"Of course I do do a little something else on the side. Avocation. I'm in the brokerage business. But my chief business is looking after the Sherwood interests. You see, my mother—father died ten years before she did—my mother, being dotty about the innate superiority of the male, left me in control of practically everything, and I do as well by it as the more important occupation of farming will permit. Which completes the racy history of myself."

"I'm sorry I can't reciprocate."

"That's all right, Captain Nemo. There's plenty of time—and it doesn't make any difference, anyhow." For all his light manner and careless chatter, Larry had a sense that Dick had been sizing him up all this while; that, in fact, to do this was the real purpose of the present call. Dick slipped to his feet. "If you're just now a bit shy on duds, as I understand you are, why, we're about the same size. Tell Judkins what you want, and make him give you plenty. What time you got?"

"Just ten o'clock."

"By heck—time a farmer was pulling on his overalls and going forth to his dew-gemmed toil!"

"And time for me to be seeing your sister," said Larry, rising.

"Come on. I'm a good seneschal, or major domo, or what you like—and I'll usher you into her highness's presence."

A moment later Larry was pushed through the library door and Dick announced in solemn tone:

"Senorita—Mademoiselle—our serene, revered, and most high sister Isabel, permit us to present our newest and most charming friend, Captain Nemo."

"Dick," exclaimed Miss Sherwood, "get out of here and get yourself into some clothes!"

"Listen to that!" complained Dick. "She still talks to me as though I were her small brother. Next thing she'll be ordering me to wash behind my ears!"

"Get out, and shut the door after you!"

The reply was Dick's stately exit and the sharp closing of the door.

"Has Dick been talking to you about himself?" asked Miss Sherwood.

"Yes."

"What did he say?"

Larry gave the substance of the autobiography which Dick had volunteered.

"Part of that is more than the truth, part less than the truth," Miss Sherwood remarked. "But this morning we were to have a real talk about your affairs, and let's get to the subject."

She had motioned him to a chair beside the quaint old desk, and they were now sitting face to face. Isabel Sherwood looked as much the finished patrician as on the evening before, and with that easy, whimsical humor and the direct manner of the person who is sure of herself; and in the sober, disillusioning daylight she had no less of beauty than had seemed hers in the softer lighting of their first meeting. The clear, fresh face with its violet-blue eyes was gazing at him intently. Larry realized that she was looking into the very soul of him, and he sat silent during this estimate which he recognized she had the right to make.

"Mr. Hunt has written me the main facts about you, certainly the worst," she said finally. "You need tell me nothing further, if you prefer not to do so; but it might be helpful if I knew more of the details."

Larry felt that there was no information he was not willing to give this clear-eyed, charming woman; and so he told her all that had happened since his return from Sing Sing, including his falling in love with Maggie, the nature of their conflict, her departure into the ways of her ambition.

"You are certainly facing a lot of difficult propositions." Miss Sherwood checked them off on her fingers. "The police are after you—your old friends are after you—you do not dare be caught. You want to clear yourself—you want to make a business success—you want to eradicate Maggie's present ambitions and remove her from her present influences."

"That is the correct total," said Larry.

"Certainly a large total! Of them all, which is the most important item?"

Larry considered. "Maggie," he confessed. "But Maggie really includes all the others. To have any influence with her, I must get out of the power of the police, I must overcome her belief that I am a stool and a squealer, and I must prove to her that I can make a success by going straight."

"Just so. And all these things you must do while a fugitive in hiding."

"Exactly. Or else not do them."

"H'm!... The most pressing thing, I judge, is to have a safe and permanent place to hide, and to have work which may lead to an opportunity to prove yourself a success."

"Yes."

"Mr. Hunt's O.K. on you would be sufficient, in any event, and he has given that O.K.," Miss Sherwood said in her even voice. "Besides, my own judgment prompts me to believe in your truth and your sincerity. I have been thinking the matter over since I saw you last night. I therefore ask you to remain here, never leaving the apartment—"

"Miss Sherwood!" he ejaculated.

"And a little later, when we go out to our place on Long Island, you'll have more freedom. For the present you will be, to the servants and any other persons who may chance to come in, Mr. Brandon, a second cousin staying with us; and your explanation for never venturing forth can be that you are convalescing after an operation. Perhaps you can think of a plan whereby later on you might occasionally leave the house without too great risk to yourself."

"Yes. The risk comes from the police, and from some of my old friends and the gangsters they have enlisted. So long as they believe me in New York, they'll all be on the lookout for me every moment. If they believed me out of New York, they would all discontinue their vigilance. If—if—But perhaps you would not care to do so much."

"Go on."

"Would you be willing to write a letter to some friend in Chicago, requesting the friend to post an enclosed letter written by me?"

"Certainly."

"My handwriting would be disguised—but a person who really knows my writing would penetrate the attempted disguise and recognize it as mine. My letter would be addressed to my grandmother requesting her to express my recent purchase of forfeited pledges to me in Chicago. A clever person reading the letter would be certain I was asking her to send me my clothes."

"What's the point to that?"

"One detail of the police's search for me will be to open secretly, with the aid of the postal authorities, all mail addressed to my grandmother. They will steam open this letter about my clothes, then seal it and let it be delivered. But they will have learned that I have escaped them and am in Chicago. They will drop the hunt here and telegraph the Chicago police, And of course the news will leak through to my old friends, and they'll also stop looking for me in New York."

"I see."

"And enclosed in another letter written by you, I'll send an order, also to be posted in Chicago, to a good friend of mine asking him to call at the express office, get my clothes, and hold them until I call or send for them. When he goes and asks for the clothes, the Chicago police will get him and find the order on him. They'll have no charge at all against him, but they'll have further proof that I'm in Chicago or some place in the Middle West. The effect will be definitely to transfer the search from New York."

"Yes, I see," repeated Miss Sherwood. "Go ahead and do it; I'll help you. But for the present you've got to remain right here in the apartment, as I said. And later, when you think the letters have had their effect, you must use the utmost caution."

"Certainly," agreed Larry.

"Now as to your making a start in business. I suspect that my affairs are in a very bad shape. Things were left to my brother, as he told you. I have a lot of papers, all kinds of accounts, which he has brought to me and he's bringing me a great many more. I can't make head or tail of them, and I think my brother is about as much befuddled as I am. I believe only an expert can understand them. Mr. Hunt says you have a very keen mind for such matters. I wish you'd take charge of these papers, and try to straighten them out."

"Miss Sherwood," Larry said slowly, "you know my record and yet you risk trusting me with your affairs?"

"Not that I wouldn't take the risk—but whatever there is to steal, some one else has already stolen it, or will steal it. Your work will be to discover thefts or mistakes, and to prevent thefts or mistakes if you can. You see I am not placing any actual control over stealable property in you—not yet.... Well, what do you say?"

"I can only say, Miss Sherwood, that you are more than good, and that I am more than grateful, and that I shall do my best!"

Miss Sherwood regarded him thoughtfully for a long space. Then she said: "I am going to place something further in your hands, for if you are as clever as I think you are, and if life has taught you as much as I think it has, I believe you can help me a lot. My brother Dick is wild and reckless. I wish you'd look out for him and try to hold him in check where you can. That is, if this isn't placing too great a duty on you."

"That's not a duty—it's a compliment!"

"Then that will be all for the present. I'll see you again in an hour or two, when I shall have some things ready to turn over to you."

Back in his bedroom Larry walked exultantly to and fro. He had security! And at last he had a chance—perhaps the chance he had been yearning for through which he was ultimately to prove himself a success!...

He wondered yet more about Miss Sherwood. And again about her and Hunt. Miss Sherwood was clever, gracious, everything a man could want in a woman; and he guessed that behind her humorous references to Hunt there was a deep feeling for the big painter who was living almost like a tramp in the attic of the Duchess's little house. And Larry knew Miss Sherwood was the only woman in Hunt's life; Hunt had said as much. They were everything to each other; they trusted each other. Yet there was some wide breach between the two; evidently his own crisis had forced the only communication which had passed between the two for months. He wondered what that breach could be, and what had been its cause.

And then an idea began to open its possibilities. What a splendid return, if, somehow, he could do something that would help bring together these two persons who had befriended him!...

But most of the time, while he waited for Miss Sherwood to summon him again, he wondered about Maggie. Yes, as he had told Miss Sherwood, Maggie was the most important problem of his life: all his many other problems were important only in the degree that they aided or hindered the solution of Maggie. Where was she?—what was she doing?—how was he, in this pleasant prison which he dared not leave, ever to overcome her scorn of him, and ever to divert her from that dangerous career in which her proud and excited young vision saw only the brilliant and profitable adventure of high romance?



CHAPTER XIII

When Maggie rode away forever from the house of the Duchess with Barney Palmer and her father, after the denunciation of Larry by the three of them as a stool and a squealer, she was the thrilled container of about as many diversified emotions as often bubble and swirl in a young girl at one and the same time. There was anger and contempt toward Larry: Larry who had weakly thrown aside a career in which he was a master, and who had added to that bad the worse of being a traitor. There was the lifting sense that at last she had graduated; that at last she was set free from the drab and petty things of life; that at last she was riding forth into the great brilliant world in which everything happened—forth into the fascinating, bewildering Unknown.

Barney and Old Jimmie talked to each other as the taxicab bumped through the cobbled streets, their talk being for the most part maledictions against Larry Brainard. But their words were meaningless sounds to the silent Maggie, all of whose throbbing faculties were just then merged into an excited endeavor to perceive the glorious outlines of the destiny toward which she rode. However, as the cab turned into Lafayette Place and rolled northward, her curiosity about the unknown became conscious and articulate.

"Where am I going?" she asked.

"First of all to a nice, quiet hotel." It was Barney who answered; somehow Barney had naturally moved into the position of leader, and as naturally her father had receded to second place. "We've got everything fixed, Maggie. Rooms reserved, and a companion waiting there for you."

"A companion!" exclaimed Maggie. "What for?"

"To teach you the fine points of manners, and to help you buy clothes. She's a classy bird all right. I advertised and picked her out of a dozen who applied."

"Barney!" breathed Maggie. She was silent a dazed moment, then asked: "Just—just what am I going to do?"

"Listen, Maggie: I'll spill you the whole idea. I'd have told you before, but it's developed rather sudden, and I've not had a real chance, and, besides, I knew you'd be all for it. Jimmie and I have canned that stock-selling scheme for good—unless an easy chance for it develops later. Our big idea now is to put YOU across!" Barney believed that there might still remain in Maggie some lurking admiration for Larry, some influence of Larry over her, and to eradicate these completely by the brilliance of what he offered was the chief purpose of his further quick-spoken words. "To put you across in the biggest kind of a way, Maggie! A beautiful, clever woman who knows how to use her brains, and who has brainy handling, can bring in more money, and in a safer way, than any dozen men! And I tell you, Maggie, I'll make you a star!"

"Barney!... But you haven't told me just what I'm to do."

"The first thing will be just a try-out; it'll help finish your education. I've got it doped out, but I'll not tell you till later. The main idea is not to use you in just one game, Maggie, but to finish you off so you'll fit into dozens of games—be good year after year. A big actress who can step right into any big part that comes her way. That's what pays! I tell you, Maggie, there's no other such good, steady proposition on earth as the right kind of woman. And that's what you're going to be!"

Maggie had heard much this same talk often before. Then it had been vague, and had dealt with an indefinite future. Now she was too dazzled by this picture of near events which the eager Barney was drawing to be able to make any comment.

"I'll be right behind you in everything, and so will Jimmie," Barney continued in his exciting manner—"but you'll be the party out in front who really puts the proposition over. And we'll keep to things where the police can't touch us. Get a man with coin and position tangled up right in a deal with a woman, and he'll never let out a peep and he'll come across with oodles of money. Hundreds of ways of working that. A strong point about you, Maggie, is you have no police record. Neither have I, though the police suspect me—but, as I said, I'll keep off the stage as much as I can. I tell you, Maggie, we're going to put over some great stuff! Great, I tell you!"

Maggie felt no repugnance to what had been said and implied by Barney. How could she, when since her memory began she had lived among people who talked just these same things? To Maggie they seemed the natural order. At that moment she was more concerned by a fascinating necessity which Barney's flamboyant enterprise entailed.

"But to do anything like that, won't I need clothes?"

"You'll need 'em, and you'll have 'em! You're going to have one of the swellest outfits that ever happened. You'll make Paris ashamed of itself!"

"No use blowing the whole roll on Maggie's clothes," put in Old Jimmie, speaking for the first time.

Barney turned on him caustically, almost savagely. "You're a hell of a father, you are—counting the pennies on his own daughter! I told you this was no piker's game, and you agreed to it—so cut out the idea you're in any nickel-in-the-slot business!"

Old Jimmie felt physical pain at the thought of parting from money on such a scale. His earlier plans concerning Maggie had never contemplated any such extravagance. But he was silenced by the dominant force behind Barney's sarcasm.

"Miss Grierson—she's your companion—knows what's what about clothes," continued Barney to Maggie. "Here's the dope as I've handed it to her. You're an orphan from the West, with some dough, who's come to New York as my ward and Jimmie's and we want you to learn a few things. To her and to any new people we meet I'm your cousin and Jimmie is your uncle. You've got that all straight?"

"Yes," said Maggie.

"You're to use another name. I've picked out Margaret Cameron for you. We can call you Maggie and it won't be a slip-up—see? If any of the coppers who know you should tumble on to you, just tell 'em you dropped your own name so's to get clear of your old life. They can't do anything to you. And tell 'em you inherited a little coin; that's why you're living so swell. They can't do anything about that either. ... Here's where we get out. Got a sitting-room, two bedrooms and a bath hired for you here. But we'll soon move you into a classier hotel."

The taxi had stopped in front of one of the unpretentious, respectable hotels in the Thirties, just off Fifth Avenue, and Maggie followed the two men in. This hotel did, indeed, in its people, its furnishings, its atmosphere, seem sober and commonplace after the Ritzmore; but at the Ritzmore she had been merely a cigarette-girl, a paid onlooker at the gayety of others. Here she was a real guest—here her great life was beginning! Maggie's heart beat wildly.

Up in her sitting-room Barney introduced her to Miss Grierson, then departed with a significant look at Old Jimmie, saying he would return presently and leaving Old Jimmie behind. Old Jimmie withdrew into a corner, turned to the racing part of the Evening Telegram, which, with the corresponding section of the Morning Telegraph, was his sole reading, and left Maggie to the society of Miss Grierson.

Maggie studied this strange new being, her hired "companion," with furtive keenness; and after a few minutes, though she was shyly obedient in the manner of an untutored orphan from the West, she had no fear of the other. Miss Grierson was a large, flat-backed woman who was on the descending slope of middle age. She was really a "gentlewoman," in the self-pitying and self-praising sense in which those who advertise themselves as such use that word. She was all the social forms, all the proprieties. She was deferentially autocratic; her voice was monotonously dignified and cultured; and she was tired, which she had a right to be, for she had been in this business of being a gentlewomanly hired aunt to raw young girls for over a quarter of a Century.

To the tired but practical eye of Miss Grierson, here was certainly a young woman who needed a lot of working over to make into a lady. And though weary and unthrillable as an old horse, Miss Grierson was conscientious, and she was going to do her best.

Maggie made a swift survey of her new home. The rooms were just ordinary hotel rooms, furnished with the dingy, wholesale pretentiousness of hotels of the second rate. But they were the essence of luxury compared to her one room at the Duchess's with its view of dreary back yards. These rooms thrilled her. They were her first material evidence that she was now actually launched upon her great adventure.

Maggie had dinner in her sitting-room with Old Jimmie and Miss Grierson—and of that dinner, mediocre and sloppy, and chilled by its transit of twelve stories from the kitchen, Miss Grierson, by way of an introductory lesson, made an august function, almost diagrammatic in its educational details. After the dinner, with Miss Grierson's slow and formal aid, which consisted mainly in passages impressively declaimed from her private book of decorum, Maggie spent two hours in unpacking her suitcase and trunk, and repacking her scanty wardrobe in drawers of the chiffonier and dressing-table; a task which Maggie, left to herself, could have completed in ten minutes.

Maggie was still at this task in her bedroom when she heard Barney enter her sitting-room. "He got away," she heard him say in a low voice to Old Jimmie.

She slipped quickly out of her bedroom and closed the door behind her. An undefined something had suddenly begun to throb within her.

"Who got away, Barney?" she demanded in a hushed tone.

Her look made Barney think rapidly. He was good at quick thinking, was Barney. He decided to tell the truth—or part of it.

"Larry Brainard."

"Got away from what?" she pursued.

"The police. They were after him on some charge. And some of his pals were after him, too. They were out to get him because he had squealed on Red Hannigan and Jack Rosenfeldt. Both parties were closing in on him at about the same time. But Larry got a tip somehow, and made his get-away."

"When did it happen?"

"Must have happened a little time after we all left the Duchess's."

"But—but, Barney—how did you learn it so soon?"

"Just ran into Officer Gavegan over on Broadway and he told me," lied Barney. He preferred not to tell her that he had been upon the scene with Little Mick and Lefty Ed; for the third figure which Larry had descried through the misty shadows had indeed been Barney Palmer. Also Barney preferred not to tell what further subtle share he had had in the causes for Larry's flight.

"Do you think he—he made a safe get-away?"

"Safe for a few hours. Gavegan told me they'd have him rounded up by noon to-morrow." Barney was more conscious of Maggie's interest than was Maggie herself, and again was desirous of destroying it or diverting it. "Generally I'm for the other fellow against the police. But this time I'm all for the coppers. I hope they land Larry—he's got it coming to him. Remember that he's a stool and a squealer."

And swiftly Barney switched the subject. "Let's be moving along, Jimmie."

He drew Maggie out into the hall, to make more certain that Miss Grierson would not overhear. "Well, Maggie," he exulted, "haven't I made good so far in my bargain to put you over?"

"Yes."

"Of course we're going slow at first. That's how you've got to handle big deals—careful. But you'll sure be a knock-out when that she-undertaker in there gets you rigged out in classy clothes. Then the curtain will go up on the real show—and it's going to be a big show—and you'll be the hit of the piece!"

With that incitement to Maggie's imagination Barney left her; and Old Jimmie followed, furtively giving Maggie a brief, uncertain look.



CHAPTER XIV

A block away from the hotel Barney parted from Old Jimmie. For a space Barney thought of his partner. Barney had quick eyes which were quite capable of taking in two things at once; and while he had seen the excited glow his final speech had brought back into Maggie's face, he had also caught that swift look of uncertainty in the lean, cunning face of Old Jimmie: a look of one who is eager to go on, yet sees himself frustrated by his own eagerness. To Barney it was a puzzling, suspicious look.

As Barney made his way toward a harbor of refreshment he wondered about Old Jimmie—not in the manner Larry had wondered about a father bringing his daughter up into crooked ways—but he wondered what kind of a man beneath his shrewd, yielding, placating manner Old Jimmie really was, how far he was to be trusted, whether he was in this game on the level or whether he was playing some very secret hand of his own. Though he had known and worked with Old Jimmie for years, Barney had never been admitted to the inner chambers of the older man's character. He sensed that there were hidden rooms and twisting passages; and of this much he was certain, that Old Jimmie was sly and saturnine.

Well, he would be on guard that Old Jimmie didn't put anything over on your obliging servant, Barney Palmer!

This was the era of legal prohibition, but thus far Barney had not been severely discommoded by the action of the representatives of America's free institutions in Washington, for Barney knew his New York. In an ex-saloon on Sixth Avenue, which nominally sold only the soft drinks permitted by the wise men of the Capital, Barney leaned at his ease upon the bar and remarked: "Give me some of the real stuff, Tim, and forget that eye-dropper the boss bought you last week." Barney had a drink of the real stuff, and then another drink, in the measuring of neither of which had an eye-dropper been involved.

After that, much heartened, he put two dollars upon the bar and went his way. His course took the dapper Barney into three of the gayest restaurants in the Times Square section; and in these Barney paused long enough to speak to a few after-theater supper-parties. For this was the hour when Barney paid his social calls; he was very strict with himself upon this point. Barney was really by way of being a rising figure in this particular circle of New York society composed of people who had or believed they had an interest in the theater, of expensively gowned women the foreground of whose lives was most attractive, but whose background was perhaps wisely kept out of the picture, and of moneyed young men who gloried in the idea that they were living the life. These social calls from gay table to gay table, at all of which Barney was welcome—for here Barney showed only his most attractive surfaces, his most brilliant facets—were in truth a very important part of Barney's business.

A little later, alone at a corner table in a quieter restaurant, Barney was eating his supper and making an inventory of his prospects. He was in a very exultant mood. The whiskey he had drunk had given broad wings to his self-satisfaction; and what he was now sipping from his tea-cup—it was not tea, for Barney was on the proper terms with his waiter here—this draught from his tea-cup tipped these broad wings at a yet more soaring angle.

Yes, he had certainly put it over so far. And Maggie would certainly prove a winner. Those fair women he had chatted with as he had moved from table to table, why, they'd be less than dirt compared to Maggie when Maggie was rigged out and readied up and the stage was set. And it had been he, Barney Palmer, who had been the first to discover Maggie's latent possibilities!

He had an eye beyond mere surfaces, had Barney. He had used women in the past in putting over many of his more private transactions (and had done so partly for the reason that using women so was eminently "safe"—this despite his violent outburst of sneering disdain at Larry when the latter had spoken of safety): some of them professional sharpers, some unscrupulous actresses of the lower flight—such women as he had just chatted with in the restaurants where he had made his brief visits. But such, he now recognized, were rather BLASEES, rather too obvious. They were the blown rose. But Maggie was fresh, and once she was properly broken in, she would be his perfect instrument. Yes, perfect!

Barney's plans soared on. Some day, when it fitted in just right with his plans, he was going to marry Maggie, It was only recently that he had seen her full charms, and still more recently that he had determined upon marriage. That decision had materially altered certain details of the career Barney had blue-printed for himself. Barney had long regarded marriage as an asset for himself; a valuable resource which he must hold in reserve and not liquidate, or capitalize, until his own market was at its peak. He knew that he was good-looking, an excellent dancer, that he had the metropolitan finish. He had calculated that sometime some rich girl, perhaps from the West, who did not know the world too well, would fall under the spell of his charms; and he would marry her promptly while she was still infatuated, before she could learn too much about him. Such had been Barney's idea of marriage for himself; which is very similar to ideas held by thousands of gentlemen, young and otherwise, in this broad land of ours, who consider themselves neither law-breakers nor adventurers.

But that was all changed now. Now it was Maggie, though Maggie in pursuit of their joint advantage might possibly first have to go through the marriage ceremony with some other man. Of course, a very, very rich man! Barney already had this man marked. He hoped, though, they would not have to go so far as marriage. However, he was willing to wait his proper turn. As he had told Maggie, you could not put over a big thing in a hurry.

As for Larry, he'd certainly handled that business in swell fashion! He'd certainly put a crimp in what had been developing between Larry and Maggie. And he'd get Larry in time, too. The drag-net was too large and close of mesh for Larry to hope to escape it. The word he'd slipped that boob Gavegan had sure done the business! And the indirect way he had tipped off the police about Red Hannigan and Jack Rosenfeldt and had then made his pals think Larry had squealed—that was sure playing the game, too! Jack and Red would get off easy—there was nothing on them; but little old Barney Palmer had certainly used his bean in the way he had set the machinery of the police and the under-world in motion against Larry!

While other occupants of the cafe, particularly the women, stole looks at the handsome, flawlessly dressed, interesting-looking Barney, Barney had yet another of those concoctions which the discreet waiter served in a tea-cup. He'd done a great little job, you bet! Not another man in New York could have done better. He was sure going to put Maggie across! And in doing so, he was going to do what was right by yours truly.

All seemed perfect in Barney's world....

And while Barney sat exulting over triumphs already achieved and those inevitably to be achieved, Maggie lay in her new bed dreaming exultant dreams of her own: heedless of the regular snoring which resounded in the adjoining room—for the excellent Miss Grierson, while able to keep her every act in perfect form while in the conscious state, unfortunately when unconscious had no more control of the goings-on of her mortal functions than the lowliest washwoman. Maggie's flights of fancy circled round and round Larry. She stifled any excuses or insurgent yearnings for him. He'd deserved what he had got. Already, contrary to his predictions, she had made a tremendous advance into her brilliant future. She would show him! Yes, she would show him! Oh, but she was going to do things!

But while she dreamed thus, shaping a magnificent destiny—an independent, self-engineered young woman, so very, very confident of the great future she was going to achieve through the supremacy of her own will and her own abilities—no slightest surmise came into her mind that Barney Palmer was making plans by which her will was to count as naught and by which he was to be the master of her fate, and that the furtive, yielding Old Jimmie was also dreaming a patient dream in which she was to be a mere chess-piece which was to capture a long-cherished game.

And yet, after all, Maggie's dreams, aside from the peculiar twist life had given them, were fundamentally just the ordinary dreams of youth: of willful confident youth, to whom but a small part of the world has yet been opened, who in fact does not yet half know its own nature.



CHAPTER XV

No prison could have been more agreeable—that is, no prison from which Maggie was omitted—than this in which Larry was now confined. He had the run of the apartment; Dick Sherwood outfitted him liberally with clothing from his superabundance of the best; Judkins and the other servants treated him as the member of the family which they had been informed he was; the lively Dick, with his puppy-like friendliness, asked never an uncomfortable question, and placed Larry almost on the footing of a chum; and the whimsically smiling Miss Sherwood treated Larry exactly as she might have treated any well-bred gentleman and in every detail made good on her promise to give him a chance. In fact, in all his life Larry had never lived so well.

As for Miss Sherwood's aunt, a sister of Miss Sherwood's mother and a figure of pale, absent-minded dignity, she kept very much to her own sitting-room. She was a recent convert to the younger English novelists, and was forced to her seclusion by the amazing fecundity with which they kept repopulating her reading-table. Larry she accepted with a hazy, preoccupied politeness, eager always to get back to the more substantial characters of her latest fiction.

Of course Miss Sherwood did not make of Larry a complete confidant. For all her smiling, easy frankness, he knew that there were many doors of her being which she never unlocked for him. What he saw was so interesting that he could not help being interested about the rest. Of course many details were open to him. She was an excellent sportswoman; a rare dancer; there were many men interested in her; she dined out almost every other evening at some social affair blooming belatedly in May (most of her friends were already settled in their country homes, and she was still in town only because her place on Long Island was in disorder due to a two months' delay in the completion of alterations caused by labor difficulties); she had made a study of beetles; she had a tiny vivarium in the apartment and here she would sit studying her pets with an interest and patience not unlike that of old Fabre upon his stony farm. Also, as Larry learned from her accounts, there was a day nursery on the East Side whose lack of a deficit was due to her.

All in all she was a healthy, normal, intelligent, unself-sacrificing woman who belonged distinctly to her own day; who gave a great deal to life, and who took a great deal from life.

Often Larry wished she would speak of Hunt. He was curious about Hunt, of whom he thought daily; and such talk might yield him information about the blustering, big-hearted painter who was gypsying it down at the Duchess's. But as the days passed she never mentioned Hunt again; not even to ask where he was or what he was doing. She was adhering very strictly to the remark she had made the night Larry came here: "I don't want to know until he wants me to know." And so Hunt remained the same incomplete picture to Larry; the painter was indubitably at home in such surroundings as these, and he was at home as a roistering, hard-working vagabond at the Duchess's—but all the vast spaces between were utterly blank, except for the sketchy remarks Hunt had made concerning himself.

Larry had guessed that hurt pride was the reason for Hunt's vanishment from the world which had known him. But he knew hurt pride was not Miss Sherwood's motive for making no inquiries. Anger? No. Jealousy? No. Some insult offered her? No. Larry went through the category of ordinary motives, of possible happenings; but he could find none which would reconcile her very keen and kindly feeling for Hunt with her abstinence from all inquiries.

From his first day in his sanctuary Larry spent long hours every day over the accounts and documents Miss Sherwood had put in his hands. They were indeed a tangle. Originally the Sherwood estate had consisted of solid real-estate holdings. But now that Larry had before him the records of holdings and of various dealings he learned that the character of the Sherwood fortune had altered greatly. Miss Sherwood's father had neglected the care of this sober business in favor of speculative investment and even outright gambling in stocks; and Dick, possessing this strain of his father, and lacking his father's experience, had and was speculating even more wildly.

Larry had followed the market since he had been in a broker's office almost ten years earlier, so he knew what stock values had been and had some idea of what they were now. The records, and some of the stock Larry found in the safe, recalled the reputation of the elder Sherwood. He had been known as a spirited, daring man who would buy anything or sell anything; he had been several times victimized by sharp traders, some of these out-and-out confidence men. Studying these old records Larry remembered that the elder Sherwood a dozen years before had lost a hundred thousand in a mining deal which Old Jimmie Carlisle had helped manipulate.

Larry found hundreds and hundreds of thousands of stock in the safe that were just so much waste paper, and he found records of other hundreds of thousands in safety deposit vaults that had no greater value. The real estate, the more solid and to the male Sherwoods the less interesting part of the fortune, had long been in the care of agents; and since Larry was prohibited from going out and studying the condition and true value of these holdings, he had to depend upon the book valuations and the agents' reports and letters. Upon the basis of these valuations he estimated that some holdings were returning a loss, some a bare one and a half per cent, and some running as high as fifteen per cent. Larry found many complaints from tenants; some threatening letters from the Building Department for failure to make ordered alterations to comply with new building laws; and some rather perfunctory letters of advice and recommendation from the agents themselves.