e! We'll have a nifty little place,
all right! You know I'm dippy about you....And, Maggie, I don't even
want you to go back in there where Larry Brainard is. Let's drive back
uptown and start in together now! To-night!"

It was not the fact that he had not suggested marriage which stirred
Maggie: men and women in Barney's class lived together, and sometimes
they were married and sometimes they were not. It was something else,
something of which she was not definitely conscious: but she felt no
such momentary thrill, no momentary, dazing surrender, as she had felt
the night when Larry had similarly held her.

"Stop that, Barney!" she gasped. "Let me go!" She struggled fiercely,
and then tore herself free.

"What's wrong with you?" panted Barney. "You're mine, ain't you?"

"You leave me alone! I'm going to get out!"

She had the door open, and was stepping out when he caught her sleeve.
But she pulled so determinedly that to have held her would have meant
nothing better than ripping the sleeve out of her coat. So he freed her
and followed her across the sidewalk to the Duchess's door.

"What's the idea?" he demanded, choking with fierce jealousy. "It's not
Larry, after all? You're not going to let him make you go straight?"

She had recovered her poise, and she replied banteringly:

"As I said, how can I tell what he's going to make me do?"

She heard him draw a deep, quivering breath between clenched teeth; but
she could not see how his figure tensed and how his face twisted into a
glower.

"Get this, Maggie: Larry Brainard is never going to be able to make you
do anything. You get that?"

"Yes, I get it, Barney; good-night," she said lightly.

And Maggie slipped through the door and left Barney trembling in the
little street.

CHAPTER IX

Maggie, as she mounted to her room, was hardly conscious of the ring
of menace in Barney's voice; but once she was in bed, his tone and his
words came back to her and stirred a strange uneasiness in her mind.
Barney was angry; Barney was cunning; Barney would stop at nothing to
gain his ends. What might be behind his threatening words?

The next morning as she was coming in with milk for her breakfast
coffee, she met Larry in the Duchess's room behind the pawnshop. He
smilingly planted himself squarely in her way.

"See here, Maggie--aren't you ever going to speak to a fellow?"

Something within her surged up impelling her to tell him of Barney's
savage ye