CHAPTER XXXIV

But when Barney’s latch-key slid into the door and Barney, in a smart dinner jacket, came in, Maggie was herself again.  Indeed she was better than herself, for there rushed to her support that added power which she had just been despairing of, which carries some people through an hour of crisis, and which may occasionally lift an actor above himself when fortune gives him a difficult yet splendid part which is the great chance of his career.

And Maggie showed to the eye that she was better than her best, for Barney exclaimed the instant he was beside her:  “Gee, Maggie, you look like the Queen of Sheba, whoever that dame was!  Any guy would fall for you to-night—­and fall so hard that he’d break, or go broke!”

But Barney was too eager to await any response.  “What’s behind the hurry-up call you sent in?  Anything broken yet?”

“Something big!  But sit down.  There’s a lot to tell.  And I must tell it quick—­before my”—­she could not force herself to say “father”—­ “before Old Jimmie comes, and Dick.”

“Then Dick’s coming?”

“Yes.  Things have taken a twist so that everything breaks to-night.  But sit down, and I’ll tell you everything.”

She had noted that the door behind which Larry stood, and to which he had captured the key, was open a bare half-inch.  It looked no more suspicious than any closet door that by accident had swung free of its latch, but by deft maneuvering Maggie managed so that Barney sat at the table with his back toward both closets.

“Go to it, Maggie,” he urged.

The plan which had swiftly developed from Dick Sherwood’s idea required that she should tell much that was the truth and much that was not truth, and required that she should play with every faculty and every attraction she possessed upon Barney’s tremendous vanity and upon his jealous admiration of her.  She had to make him believe more in her as a pal than ever before; she had to make him want her more as a woman than ever before.  And at this moment she felt herself thrillingly equal to this vampire role her over-stimulated sense of justice had commanded her to undertake.

“Things have gone great,” she began, speaking concisely, yet trying not in this eager brevity to lose the convincing effect that she would be the complete mistress of any enterprise to which she yielded her interest.  “Dick Sherwood proposed to me again, and this time I said `yes.’  I saw that he was ready for anything, so I took some things into my hands.  I had to, for I saw we had to act quick even at the risk of losing a bit of the maximum figure we had counted on.  You see I realized the danger to us in Larry Brainard suddenly showing up, and his knowing, as he told us he did, who the sucker is that we’ve been stringing along.  Anything might happen, any minute, from Larry Brainard that would upset everything.  So I reasoned that we had to collect quick or run the risk of never getting a nickel.”