“Your father was a positive marvel as a trainer.  He put two or three international stars on their dancing legs, if you will permit the expression.  He was the dancing master of two worlds and”—­the impresario laughed significantly—­“many other interesting things besides.  But to stick to the matter in hand—­if you want, your contract with Webster and Forster is null and void.”  He paused for an instant and began again, this time addressing himself more to Frederick.  “I do not deny that I am a business man—­always within the limits of gentlemanliness—­and I should like to ask you a question, Doctor von Kammacher.  Is it your intention to let Miss Hahlstroem dance at all again, or have you and she decided that she is to retire to private life?”

“Oh, no,” said Ingigerd very decidedly.

Frederick felt something like cold iron enter his soul.  He seemed to himself to be a sword-swallower unable immediately to extract the steel from his body.

“No, we have not,” he, too, said, “though I for my part should like Miss Hahlstroem to give up the stage because she has a delicate constitution.  But she maintains she needs the sensation of it.  And when I see the offers she receives, I do not know whether I have the right to persuade her against her will.”

“Don’t, Doctor von Kammacher, don’t!” cried Mr. Lilienfeld.  “Miss Hahlstroem, Doctor von Kammacher, let me take up the cudgels for you against Webster and Forster—­bloodsuckers, I tell you—­and they’ve insulted the lady, besides.  I assure you, they are the source of a lot of vile rumours about her.”

“Mention names,” said Frederick, turning white.  “I shall have no difficulty, I fancy, in finding a second, and I hope the same code of honour holds for gentlemen here as in Europe.”

“Tush—­tush!” The impresario lifted his fat hands in pacification, and it seemed to Frederick as if the business man’s round head, set low between his shoulders, were trying to make signs to him, as if he were winking his eyes furtively and were suppressing a broad smile, unexpectedly upsetting his business zeal and gravity.  “You make entirely too much of it.”  He looked Frederick straight in the face in a peculiar way with a significant expression in his large round eyes.  Then he continued:  “For an engagement of twenty evenings in cities to be decided upon, I offer you one hundred and fifty dollars more per evening than anybody else has yet offered you, the engagement to begin inside of four days.  If you are agreed, we can go to the lawyer this minute.”

Within less than half an hour Frederick and Ingigerd were standing in a huge elevator, which was to take them to the fifth floor of a New York City office building.  Ingigerd was the only woman in the elevator, and it pleased her that for her sake the nineteen gentlemen in the car held their hats in their hands.

“If you have never before seen such a thing,” Lilienfeld said to Frederick, “the offices of a big American lawyer will astonish you.  This is a law firm, two partners, Brown and Samuelson; but Brown’s a nincompoop and Samuelson is the whole thing.”