And while Barney sat exulting over triumphs already achieved and those inevitably to be achieved, Maggie lay in her new bed dreaming exultant dreams of her own:  heedless of the regular snoring which resounded in the adjoining room—­for the excellent Miss Grierson, while able to keep her every act in perfect form while in the conscious state, unfortunately when unconscious had no more control of the goings-on of her mortal functions than the lowliest washwoman.  Maggie’s flights of fancy circled round and round Larry.  She stifled any excuses or insurgent yearnings for him.  He’d deserved what he had got.  Already, contrary to his predictions, she had made a tremendous advance into her brilliant future.  She would show him!  Yes, she would show him!  Oh, but she was going to do things!

But while she dreamed thus, shaping a magnificent destiny—­an independent, self-engineered young woman, so very, very confident of the great future she was going to achieve through the supremacy of her own will and her own abilities—­no slightest surmise came into her mind that Barney Palmer was making plans by which her will was to count as naught and by which he was to be the master of her fate, and that the furtive, yielding Old Jimmie was also dreaming a patient dream in which she was to be a mere chess-piece which was to capture a long-cherished game.

And yet, after all, Maggie’s dreams, aside from the peculiar twist life had given them, were fundamentally just the ordinary dreams of youth:  of willful confident youth, to whom but a small part of the world has yet been opened, who in fact does not yet half know its own nature.

CHAPTER XV

No prison could have been more agreeable—­that is, no prison from which Maggie was omitted—­than this in which Larry was now confined.  He had the run of the apartment; Dick Sherwood outfitted him liberally with clothing from his superabundance of the best; Judkins and the other servants treated him as the member of the family which they had been informed he was; the lively Dick, with his puppy-like friendliness, asked never an uncomfortable question, and placed Larry almost on the footing of a chum; and the whimsically smiling Miss Sherwood treated Larry exactly as she might have treated any well-bred gentleman and in every detail made good on her promise to give him a chance.  In fact, in all his life Larry had never lived so well.

As for Miss Sherwood’s aunt, a sister of Miss Sherwood’s mother and a figure of pale, absent-minded dignity, she kept very much to her own sitting-room.  She was a recent convert to the younger English novelists, and was forced to her seclusion by the amazing fecundity with which they kept repopulating her reading-table.  Larry she accepted with a hazy, preoccupied politeness, eager always to get back to the more substantial characters of her latest fiction.