“That’s not a duty—­it’s a compliment!”

“Then that will be all for the present.  I’ll see you again in an hour or two, when I shall have some things ready to turn over to you.”

Back in his bedroom Larry walked exultantly to and fro.  He had security!  And at last he had a chance—­perhaps the chance he had been yearning for through which he was ultimately to prove himself a success! . . .

He wondered yet more about Miss Sherwood.  And again about her and Hunt.  Miss Sherwood was clever, gracious, everything a man could want in a woman; and he guessed that behind her humorous references to Hunt there was a deep feeling for the big painter who was living almost like a tramp in the attic of the Duchess’s little house.  And Larry knew Miss Sherwood was the only woman in Hunt’s life; Hunt had said as much.  They were everything to each other; they trusted each other.  Yet there was some wide breach between the two; evidently his own crisis had forced the only communication which had passed between the two for months.  He wondered what that breach could be, and what had been its cause.

And then an idea began to open its possibilities.  What a splendid return, if, somehow, he could do something that would help bring together these two persons who had befriended him! . . .

But most of the time, while he waited for Miss Sherwood to summon him again, he wondered about Maggie.  Yes, as he had told Miss Sherwood, Maggie was the most important problem of his life:  all his many other problems were important only in the degree that they aided or hindered the solution of Maggie.  Where was she?—­what was she doing?—­how was he, in this pleasant prison which he dared not leave, ever to overcome her scorn of him, and ever to divert her from that dangerous career in which her proud and excited young vision saw only the brilliant and profitable adventure of high romance?

CHAPTER XIII

When Maggie rode away forever from the house of the Duchess with Barney Palmer and her father, after the denunciation of Larry by the three of them as a stool and a squealer, she was the thrilled container of about as many diversified emotions as often bubble and swirl in a young girl at one and the same time.  There was anger and contempt toward Larry:  Larry who had weakly thrown aside a career in which he was a master, and who had added to that bad the worse of being a traitor.  There was the lifting sense that at last she had graduated; that at last she was set free from the drab and petty things of life; that at last she was riding forth into the great brilliant world in which everything happened—­forth into the fascinating, bewildering Unknown.

Barney and Old Jimmie talked to each other as the taxicab bumped through the cobbled streets, their talk being for the most part maledictions against Larry Brainard.  But their words were meaningless sounds to the silent Maggie, all of whose throbbing faculties were just then merged into an excited endeavor to perceive the glorious outlines of the destiny toward which she rode.  However, as the cab turned into Lafayette Place and rolled northward, her curiosity about the unknown became conscious and articulate.