“I’ll get Red Hannigan,” the Duchess said briefly.  “What do you want with him?”

“Have him come to the Hotel Grantham—­room eleven-forty-two—­at eight-fifteen sharp!”

“He’ll be there,” said the Duchess.

There followed a swirling taxi-ride back to the Grantham, and a rapid change into her most fetching evening gown (she had not even a thought of dinner) to play her bold part in the drama which she was excitedly writing in her mind and for which she had just engaged her cast.  She was on fire with terrible suspense:  would the other actors play their parts as she intended they should?—­would her complicated drama have the ending she was hoping for?

Had she been in a more composed, matter-of-fact state of mind, this play which she was staging would have seemed the crudest, most impossible melodrama—­a thing both too absurd and too dangerous for her to risk.  But Maggie was just then living through one of the highest periods of her life; she cared little what happened to her.  And it is just such moods that transform and elevate what otherwise would be absurd to the nobly serious; that changes the impossible into the possible; just as an exalted mood or mind is, or was, the primary difference between Hamlet, or Macbeth, or Lear, and any of the forgotten Bowery melodramas of a generation now gone.

She had been dressed for perhaps ten nervous minutes when the bell rang.  She admitted a slight, erect, well-dressed, middle-aged man with a lean, thin-lipped face and a cold, hard, conservative eye:  a man of the type that you see by the dozens in the better hotels of New York, and seeing them you think, if you think of them at all, that here is the canny president of some fair-sized bank who will not let a client borrow a dollar beyond his established credit, or that here is the shrewd but unobtrusive power behind some great industry of the Middle West.

“I’m Hannigan,” he announced briefly.  “I know you’re Old Jimmie Carlisle’s girl.  The Duchess told me you wanted me on something big.  What’s the idea?”

“You want to get Larry Brainard, don’t you?—­or whoever it was that squealed on you?”

There was a momentary gleam in the hard, gray eyes.  “I do.”

“That’s why you’re here.  In a little over an hour, if you stay quiet in the background, you’ll have what you want.”

“You’ve got a swell-looking lay-out here.  What’s going to be pulled off?”

“It’s not what I might tell you that’s going to help you.  It’s what you hear and see.”

“All right,” said the thin-lipped man.  “I’ll pass the questions, since the Duchess told me to do as you said.  She’s square, even if she does have a grandson who’s a stool.  I suppose I’m to be out of sight during whatever happens?”

“Yes.”

In the room there were two spacious closets, as is not infrequent in the better class of modern hotels; and it had been these two closets which had been the practical starting-point of Maggie’s development of Dick Sherwood’s proposition.  To one of these she led Hannigan.