“It certainly is!”

“And now, Maggie “—­Barney pressed her eagerly—­“I’ve shown you I’m just the sort you said a man had to be for you to tie up with him.  I’ve shown you I can guarantee you police protection.  And I’ve shown you I’m able to put over clever situations without any one ever guessing I’m the party who put ’em over.  I fit all your specifications!  How about our settling right now to join up some place—­Toronto’s the best bet—­say three days after we make our get-away after to-night’s clean-up?  Let’s be quick about this, Maggie—­ before Old Jimmie comes in.  He’s due any minute now!”

“Isn’t that him at the door now?” breathed Maggie.

Both waited intently for a moment.  But though she pretended so, Maggie’s interest was not upon the outer door.  Her attention was fixed, as it had been with sickening fear this last minute, upon that half-inch crack in the closet door behind Barney.  Why had she, in her dismayed urgence, allowed Larry to possess himself of that closet key?—­when her plan had been to keep Hannigan as well as Barlow forcibly behind the scenes until she had acted out her play?  She now hoped almost against hope that Hannigan would not burst forth and ruin what was yet to come.  Since that door unluckily had to be unlocked, her one chance was given her by the presence of Larry.  Perhaps Larry could perceive the larger things she was striving for, and in some way restrain Hannigan.

These thoughts were but an instant in passing through her brain.  Barney’s eyes came back from the outer door to her face.  “That’s not Old Jimmie yet.”

“No,” her lips said.  But her brain was saying, since the crack still remained a half-inch crack, “Larry understands—­he’s holding back Red Hannigan!”

Barney returned swiftly to his charge.  “How about Toronto, Maggie—­say exactly seventy-two hours from now—­the Royal Brunswick Hotel?”

Maggie realized she could no longer put him off if she were to keep him unsuspicious for the next hour.  Besides, in her desperate disillusionment concerning herself, she did not care what happened to her, or what people might think of her, if only she could keep this play going till its final moment.

“Yes,” she said—­“if we each feel the same way toward each other when this evening’s ended.”

“Maggie!” he cried.  “Maggie!” This time, when he exultantly caught at her hand, she dared not refuse it to him.  And she felt an additional loathing for Barney’s caress because she knew that Larry was a witness to it.

Indeed, it was difficult for Larry, at the sight of Maggie’s hand in Barney’s too eager palms, to hold himself in check; and to do this in addition to holding in check the slight, quivering Red Hannigan, whose collar and whose right wrist he had been gripping these last three minutes.  For Larry, as Maggie had hoped, had dimly apprehended something of Maggie’s plan, and he felt himself bound by the promise she had extracted from him, to let her go through with whatever she had under way; though he had no conception of her plan’s extent, and could, of course, not know of the intention of her overwrought mind to give her plan its final touch in what amounted to her own self-destruction, and in her vanishing utterly out of the knowledge of all who knew her.