if he again
did break in upon her unexpectedly, in her obstinate pride she would
heed nothing he said. He thought of seeing Barney and Old Jimmie and
somehow so throwing the fear of God into that pair that they would
withdraw Maggie from the present enterprise; but even if he succeeded
in so hazardous an undertaking, again Maggie would be left unchanged.
He thought of showing Miss Sherwood the hidden portrait of Maggie, of
telling her all and asking her aid; but this he also vetoed, for it
seemed a betrayal of Maggie.

He kept going back to one plan: not a plan exactly, but the idea upon
which the right plan might be based. If only he could adroitly, with his
hand remaining unseen, place Maggie in a situation where circumstances
would appeal conqueringly to her best self, to her latent sense of
honor--that was the idea! But cudgel his brain as he would, Larry could
not just then develop a working plan whose foundation was that idea.

But even if Larry had had a brilliant plan it would hardly have been
possible for him to have devoted himself to its execution, for two days
after his visit to Maggie at the Grantham, the Sherwoods moved out to
their summer place some forty miles from the city on the North Shore of
Long Island; and Larry was so occupied with routine duties pertaining
to this migration that at the moment he had time for little else. Cedar
Crest was individual yet typical of the better class of Long Island
summer residences. It was a long white building of many piazzas and many
wings, set on a bluff looking over the Sound, with a broad stretch of
silken lawn, and about it gardens in their June glory, and behind the
house a couple of hundred acres of scrub pine.

On the following day, according to a plan that had been worked out
between Larry and Miss Sherwood, Joe Ellison appeared at Cedar Crest
and was given the assistant gardener's cottage which stood apart on
the bluff some three hundred yards east of the house. He was a tall,
slightly bent, white-haired man, apparently once a man of physical
strength and dominance of character and with the outer markings of a
gentleman, but now seemingly a mere shadow of the forceful man of his
prime. As a matter of fact, Joe Ellison had barely escaped that greatest
of prison scourges, tuberculosis.

The roses were given over to his care. For a few brief years during the
height of his prosperity he had owned a small place in New Jersey and
during that period had seem