“I have nobody but you to thank for this,” she cried in a fury.  “Why couldn’t you let me dance the first day under Webster and Forster, as Mr. Stoss and everybody else advised?”

“Ingigerd,” said Frederick, “I had to look out for your health.”

“Stuff and nonsense!  You took the whole matter into your hands.  You acted illegally, against my expressed wish, when you chased Webster and Forster’s agent away from the cab when we left the steamer.”

Frederick was disgusted.  Mr. Garry had made his father’s personality more vivid to him than it had been for weeks.  Although his father would never have expressed and carried out his views in the same form as Mr. Garry, yet his opinions, as Frederick very well knew, were akin to the Yankee’s.  Indeed, even in Frederick’s soul, many of the same notions, implanted by birth and education, remained unshaken.  For the first time since he had fallen under Ingigerd’s spell, he realised that he was inwardly independent of her.  The one question that still troubled and occupied him was how to rid himself outwardly as well as inwardly from the degrading liaison.  Without fully admitting it to himself, he had suffered a disenchantment in Ingigerd’s dance; to judge by which, the demon’s spell was broken.  This time that alluring seductive dance had seemed inconceivably empty.  Nor was his compassion aroused to nearly the same extent as formerly.

Franck, the gypsy painter, burst in.  He behaved like a madman.  His enthusiasm, which somewhat improved Ingigerd’s temper, was of the sort that stammers and stutters and cannot find the words to express itself.  Frederick looked at him in disgust, but the next moment started when he recognised in his behaviour the marks of his own former obsession.  Ingigerd let the painter take her hand and cover it with wild, passionate kisses, which travelled from her wrist to her elbow, a demonstration that seemed to her to be perfectly natural and quite in order.

“I wish you would go visit Mr. Garry again and try to influence him with pleas and threats and money,” she said to Frederick.

“That would be foolish and useless,” Frederick declared; whereupon Ingigerd wept.

“The only friends I have,” she wailed, “are friends that exploit me.  Why isn’t Achleitner here?  Why did Achleitner have to lose his life, and not somebody else?  Achleitner was my real friend.  He knew how to go about things in the world, and he was rich and unselfish, too.”

XVII

The very next day the injunction was issued, restraining Ingigerd Hahlstroem from dancing in public.  The girl conducted herself wildly.  Lilienfeld said the time had come to place the matter before the Mayor of New York.  In order to protect Ingigerd from slander and from being sent to an orphan asylum, Lilienfeld, who was married but had no children, offered her a refuge in his own home on 124th Street near Lenox Avenue.  Whether she wanted to or not, Ingigerd had to accept.