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 perc