The lady said all this in Ingigerd’s room, intentionally refraining from lowering her voice.  Several times Frederick and Willy interrupted to ask her to moderate her tones.

“Miss Hahlstroem will not dance at all,” said Frederick, finally.

“Indeed?” said the agent.  “Then she’ll be involved in a very unpleasant law suit.”

“Miss Hahlstroem is a minor,” said Frederick, “and her father, with whom you concluded the contract, probably lost his life in the sinking of the Roland.”

“And I,” said the agent, “don’t want to lose a thousand dollars for nothing.”

“Miss Hahlstroem is sick.”

“Very well, then I’ll send my physician.”

“I myself am a physician.”

“A German physician, I suppose,” she said.  “The only physicians that count for us are Americans.”

Perhaps this American woman, equipped with a masculine intellect, masculine energy, and a masculine voice would have put through her will, had not Ingigerd’s heavy sleep defied all the noise about her, even the shaking to which she had been subjected.  At length Frederick displayed a degree of determination so unambiguous that the agent had to recede from her position and temporarily withdraw from the field.  Besides, Willy hit upon an idea, the far-reaching significance of which Frederick did not realise until later.  He declared that if the agent did not desist, he would notify the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, since Miss Hahlstroem was not yet seventeen years old.

“Gentlemen,” said the lady, evidently taken aback and coming round a bit, “remember that both Webster and Forster and myself have been spending enormous sums on advertising for four weeks.  I reckoned on a tour as far as San Francisco.  Now that Miss Hahlstroem happens to be one of the survivors of the Roland and has lost her father besides, she has become the sensation of the season.  If she were to appear now, she could return to Europe in three months with fifty thousand dollars over and above the sum contracted for.  Would you be responsible to Miss Hahlstroem for such an enormous loss?”

After the agent and her escort had left, Willy Snyders confirmed what she had said about the amount of advertising that had been done.  For weeks all the bill-boards, all the building scaffoldings, every empty barrel where building was going on were covered with posters announcing “Mara, or the Spider’s Victim.”  Sometimes they displayed a life-size figure of a dancer, represented as almost a child still, a sort of albino with red rabbit’s eyes and streaming saffron-yellow hair.  A spider, with a body the size of a small balloon, was crouching behind its web.  The poster was by Brown, the most talented poster-painter in New York.

“You can see those posters everywhere on the streets still,” said Willy Snyders.  “That’s why it seems so funny to think I always stared at them quite unsuspecting; and now Miss Ingigerd and you are in this house.  Life concocts crazy plots.  I assure you, when I looked at those posters, I thought of everything else in the world but you, Doctor von Kammacher.  And little did I divine that they would ever be of more significance to me than the advertisements of any ordinary vaudeville.”