and Red would get off easy--there was nothing on them;
but little old Barney Palmer had certainly used his bean in the way
he had set the machinery of the police and the under-world in motion
against Larry!

While other occupants of the cafe, particularly the women, stole looks
at the handsome, flawlessly dressed, interesting-looking Barney, Barney
had yet another of those concoctions which the discreet waiter served in
a tea-cup. He'd done a great little job, you bet! Not another man in New
York could have done better. He was sure going to put Maggie across! And
in doing so, he was going to do what was right by yours truly.

All seemed perfect in Barney's world....

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