Presently the Duchess entered.  No word was spoken.  The Duchess, noteworthy for her mastery of silence, sank into a chair, a bent and shrunken image, nothing seemingly alive about her but her faintly gleaming, deep-set eyes.  Several minutes passed, then Hunt lifted the canvas from the easel and stood it against the wall.

“That’s all for to-day, Maggie,” he announced, pushing the easel to one side.  “Duchess, you and this wild young thing spread the banquet-table while I wash up.”

He disappeared into a corner shut off by burlap curtains.  From within there issued the sound of splashing water and the sputtering roar of snatches of the Toreador’s song in a very big and very bad baritone.

Maggie put out a hand, and kept the Duchess from rising.  “Sit still—­ I’ll fix the table.”

Silently the Duchess acquiesced.  Maggie had never felt any tenderness toward this strange, silent woman with whom she had lived for three years, but it was perhaps an indication of qualities within Maggie, whose existence she herself never even guessed, that she instinctively pushed the old woman aside from tasks which involved any physical effort.  Maggie now swung the back of a laundry bench up to form a table-top, and upon it proceeded to spread a cloth and arrange a medley of chipped dishes.  As she moved swiftly and deftly about, the Duchess watching her with immobile features, these two made a strangely contrasting pair:  one seemingly spent and at life’s grayest end, the other electric with vitality and giving off the essence of life’s unknown adventures.

Hunt stepped out between the curtains, pulling on his coat.  “You’ll find that chow in my fireless cooker will beat the Ritz,” he boasted.  “The tenderest, fattest kind of a fatted calf for the returned prodigal.”

Maggie started.  “The prodigal!  You mean—­Larry is coming?”

“Sure,” grinned Hunt.  “That’s why we celebrate.”

Maggie wheeled upon the Duchess.  “Is Larry really coming?”

“Yes,” said the old woman.

“But—­but why the uncertainty about when he was coming back?  Father and Barney thought he was due to get out yesterday.”

“Just a mistake we all made about his release.  His time was up this afternoon.”

“But you told Barney and my father you hadn’t heard from him.”

“I had heard,” said the Duchess in her flat tone.  “If they want to see him they can see him to-morrow.”

“When—­when will he be here?”

“Any minute,” said the Duchess.

Without a word Maggie whirled about and the next moment she was in her room on the floor below.  She did not know what prompted her, but she had a frantic desire to get out of this plain shirt-waist and skirt and into something that would be striking.  She considered her scanty wardrobe; her father had recently spoken of handsome gowns and furnishings, but as yet these existed only in his words, and the pseudo-evening gowns which she had worn to restaurant dances with Barney she knew to be cheap and uneffective.