and with his crowd?"

"No one higher. They'd all take his word for anything."

"Can you find him at once?" Maggie pursued breathlessly.

That was a trifling question to ask the Duchess; since all the news of
her shadowy world came to her ears in some swift obscure manner.

"Yes. If it is necessary."

"It's terribly necessary! If I can't get him, the whole thing may fail!"

"What thing?" demanded the Duchess.

"It might all sound impossibly foolish!" cried the excited, desperate
Maggie. "You might tell me so--and discourage me--and I simply must go
ahead! I feel rather like--like a juggler who's trying for the first
time to keep a lot of new things going in the air all at once. But I
think there's a chance that I may succeed! I'll tell you just one thing.
It all has to do with Larry. I think I may help Larry."

"I'll get Red Hannigan," the Duchess said briefly. "What do you want
with him?"

"Have him come to the Hotel Grantham--room eleven-forty-two--at
eight-fifteen sharp!"

"He'll be there," said the Duchess.

There followed a swirling taxi-ride back to the Grantham, and a rapid
change into her most fetching evening gown (she had not even a thought
of dinner) to play her bold part in the drama which she was excitedly
writing in her mind and for which she had just engaged her cast. She was
on fire with terrible suspense: would the other actors play their parts
as she intended they should?--would her complicated drama have the
ending she was hoping for?

Had she been in a more composed, matter-of-fact state of mind, this play
which she was staging would have seemed the crudest, most impossible
melodrama--a thing both too absurd and too dangerous for her to risk.
But Maggie was just then living through one of the highest periods of
her life; she cared little what happened to her. And it is just such
moods that transform and elevate what otherwise would be absurd to the
nobly serious; that changes the impossible into the possible; just as an
exalted mood or mind is, or was, the primary difference between Hamlet,
or Macbeth, or Lear, and any of the forgotten Bowery melodramas of a
generation now gone.

She had been dressed for perhaps ten nervous minutes when the bell rang.
She admitted a slight, erect, well-dressed, middle-aged man with a lean,
thin-lipped face and a cold, hard, conservative eye: a man of the type
that you see by the dozens in the better hotels of New York, and seeing
them you think, if you