She had recovered her poise, and she replied banteringly: 

“As I said, how can I tell what he’s going to make me do?”

She heard him draw a deep, quivering breath between clenched teeth; but she could not see how his figure tensed and how his face twisted into a glower.

“Get this, Maggie:  Larry Brainard is never going to be able to make you do anything.  You get that?”

“Yes, I get it, Barney; good-night,” she said lightly.

And Maggie slipped through the door and left Barney trembling in the little street.

CHAPTER IX

Maggie, as she mounted to her room, was hardly conscious of the ring of menace in Barney’s voice; but once she was in bed, his tone and his words came back to her and stirred a strange uneasiness in her mind.  Barney was angry; Barney was cunning; Barney would stop at nothing to gain his ends.  What might be behind his threatening words?

The next morning as she was coming in with milk for her breakfast coffee, she met Larry in the Duchess’s room behind the pawnshop.  He smilingly planted himself squarely in her way.

“See here, Maggie—­aren’t you ever going to speak to a fellow?”

Something within her surged up impelling her to tell him of Barney’s savage yet unformulated threat.  The warning got as far as her tongue, and there halted, struggling.

Her strange, fixed look startled Larry.  “Why, what’s the matter, Maggie?” he exclaimed.

But her pride, her settled determination to unbend to him in no way and to have no dealings with him, were stronger than her impulse; and the struggling warning remained unuttered.

“Nothing’s the matter,” she said, and brushed past him and hurried up the stairway.

At times during the day, while tutoring with Mr. Bronson, Larry thought of Maggie’s strange look.  And his mind was upon it late in the afternoon when he entered the little street.  But as he neared his grandmother’s house all such thought was banished by Detective Gavegan of the Central Office stepping from the pawnshop and blocking the door with his big figure.  There was grim, triumphant purpose on the hard features of Gavegan, conceited by nature and trained to harsh dominance by long rule as a petty autocrat.

“Hello, Gavegan,” Larry greeted him pleasantly.  “Gee, but you look tickled!  Did the Duchess give you a bigger loan than you expected on the Carnegie medal you just hocked?”

“You’ll soon be cuttin’ out your line of comedy.”  Gavegan slipped his left arm through Larry’s right.  “You’re comin’ along with me, and you’d better come quiet.”

Larry stiffened.  “Come where?”

“Headquarters.”

“I haven’t done a thing, Gavegan, and you know it!  What do you want me for?”

“Me and the Chief had a little talk about you,” leered Gavegan.  “And now the Chief wants to have a little personal talk with you.  He asked me to round you up and bring you in.”