He cursed his enforced seclusion.  If only he were free to go out and do his best in the open!  But then, even if he were, his best endeavors would have little influence upon Maggie—­with her despising and distrusting him as she did, and with her so determined to go ahead in her own way.

Once during the morning, he slipped from the library into his room and gazed at the portrait of Maggie that Hunt had given him the night before:  Maggie, self-confident, willful, a beautiful nobody who was staring the world out of countenance; a Maggie that was a thousand possible Maggies.  And as he gazed he thought of the wager he had made with Hunt, and of his own rather scatter-brained plannings concerning it.  He removed Maggie’s portrait from the fellowship of the picture of the Italian mother, and hid it in his chiffonier.  Whatever he might do in his endeavor to make good his boast to Hunt, for the present he would regard Maggie’s portrait as his private property.  To use the painting as he had vaguely planned, before he had been surprised to find it Maggie’s portrait, would be to pass it on into other possession where it might become public—­where, through some chance, the Maggie of the working-girl’s cheap shirt-waist might be identified with the rich Miss Cameron of the Grantham, to Maggie’s great discomfiture, and possibly to her entanglement with the police.

When Miss Sherwood came into the library a little later, Larry tried to put Maggie and all matters pertaining to his previous night’s adventure out of his mind.  He had enough other affairs which he was trying adroitly to handle—­for instance, Miss Sherwood and Hunt; and when his business talk with her was ended, he remarked: 

“I saw Mr. Hunt last evening.”

He watched her closely, but he could detect no flash of interest at Hunt’s name.

“You went down to your grandmother’s?”

“Yes.”

“That was a very great risk for you to take,” she reproved him.  “I’m glad you got back safely.”

Despite the disturbance Maggie had been to his thoughts, part of his brain had been trying to make plans to forward this other aim; so he now told Miss Sherwood of his wager with Hunt and his bringing away a picture—­he said “one picture.”  He wanted to awaken the suppressed interest each had in the other; to help bridge or close the chasm which he sensed had opened between them.  So he brought the picture of the Italian mother from his room.  She regarded it critically, but with no sign of approval or disapproval.

“What do you think of it?” she asked.

“It’s a most remarkable piece of work!” he said emphatically—­wishing he could bring in that picture of Maggie as additional evidence supporting his opinion.

She made no further comment, and it was up to Larry to keep the conversation alive.  “What is the most Mr. Hunt ever was paid for a painting?  I mean one of what he swears at as his `pretty pictures’?”