ask you a question, Doctor von Kammacher. Is it your intention
to let Miss Hahlstroem dance at all again, or have you and she decided
that she is to retire to private life?"

"Oh, no," said Ingigerd very decidedly.

Frederick felt something like cold iron enter his soul. He seemed to
himself to be a sword-swallower unable immediately to extract the steel
from his body.

"No, we have not," he, too, said, "though I for my part should like Miss
Hahlstroem to give up the stage because she has a delicate constitution.
But she maintains she needs the sensation of it. And when I see the
offers she receives, I do not know whether I have the right to persuade
her against her will."

"Don't, Doctor von Kammacher, don't!" cried Mr. Lilienfeld. "Miss
Hahlstroem, Doctor von Kammacher, let me take up the cudgels for you
against Webster and Forster--bloodsuckers, I tell you--and they've
insulted the lady, besides. I assure you, they are the source of a lot
of vile rumours about her."

"Mention names," said Frederick, turning white. "I shall have no
difficulty, I fancy, in finding a second, and I hope the same code of
honour holds for gentlemen here as in Europe."

"Tush--tush!" The impresario lifted his fat hands in pacification, and it
seemed to Frederick as if the business man's round head, set low between
his shoulders, were trying to make signs to him, as if he were winking
his eyes furtively and were suppressing a broad smile, unexpectedly
upsetting his business zeal and gravity. "You make entirely too much of
it." He looked Frederick straight in the face in a peculiar way with a
significant expression in his large round eyes. Then he continued: "For
an engagement of twenty evenings in cities to be decided upon, I offer
you one hundred and fifty dollars more per evening than anybody else has
yet offered you, the engagement to begin inside of four days. If you are
agreed, we can go to the lawyer this minute."

Within less than half an hour Frederick and Ingigerd were standing in a
huge elevator, which was to take them to the fifth floor of a New York
City office building. Ingigerd was the only woman in the elevator, and it
pleased her that for her sake the nineteen gentlemen in the car held
their hats in their hands.

"If you have never before seen such a thing," Lilienfeld said to
Frederick, "the offices of a big American lawyer will astonish you. This
is a law firm, two partners, Brown and Samuelson; but Brown's a
ninc