would be disastrous.  If not disastrous at once, certainly in the end.  Maggie was a victim, and undoubtedly deserved sympathy.  But others should not be sacrificed merely because Maggie had suffered an injury.  She had been too long under the tutelage of Old Jimmie, and his teachings were now too thoroughly the fiber of her very being, for her to alter permanently.  She might change temporarily under the urge of an emotional revelation; but she would surely revert to her present self.  There was no doubt of that.

And the Duchess gave weight to other considerations—­all human, yet all in some measure specious.  Joe Ellison was happy in his dream, and would be happy in it all the rest of his life.  Why tell the truth and destroy his precious illusion?—­especially when there was no chance to change Maggie?

And further, she recalled the terrific temper that had lived within the composed demeanor of Joe Ellison.  The fires of that temper could not yet be all burned out.  If she told the truth, told that Jimmie Carlisle was still alive, that might be just touching the trigger of a devastating tragedy—­might be disaster for all.  What would be the use when no one would have been benefited?

And so, in the wisdom of her old head and the entanglements of her old heart, the Duchess decided she would never tell.  And that loving, human decision she was to cling to through the stress of times to come.

But even while she was thus deciding upon a measure to checkmate them both, Larry was pacing his room at Cedar Crest, at last excitedly evolving the elusive plan which was to bring Maggie to her senses and also to him; and Maggie, all unconscious of this new element which had entered as a potential factor in her existence, all unconscious of how far she had been guided from the course which had been charted for her, was lying awake at the Grantham after a late party at which Dick Sherwood had been her escort, and was exulting pridefully over the seemingly near consummation of the plan that was to show Larry Brainard how wrong he was and that was to establish her as the cleverest woman in her line—­better even than Barney or Old Jimmie believed her.

And thus separate wills each strove to direct their own lives and other lives according to their own separate plans; little thinking to what extent they were all entangled in a common destiny; and thinking not at all of the further seed that was being sown for the harvest-time of the whirlwind.

CHAPTER XXII

After Larry’s many days and nights of futile searching of his brain for a plan that would accord with his fundamental idea for awakening the unguessed other self of Maggie, the plan, which finally came to him complete in all its details in a single moment, was so simple and obvious that he marveled it could have been plainly before his eyes all this while without his ever seeing it.  Of course the plan was dangerous