lar instance he was at the advantage of being in earnest. He
forced the most expensive tidbits announced by the dinner card upon
Maggie; he gallantly and very gracefully put on and removed, as required
by circumstances, the green cobweb of a scarf Maggie had brought to
the roof as protection against the elements; and when he took the
dancing-floor with her, he swung her about and hopped up and down
and stepped in and out with all the skill of a master of the modern
perversion of dancing. Barney was really good enough to have been a
professional dancer had his desires not led him toward what seemed to
him a more exciting and more profitable career.

Maggie, not to rouse Barney's suspicions, played her role as well as he
did his own. And most of the other diners, a fraction of the changing
two or three hundred thousand people from the South and West who choose
New York as the best of all summer resorts, gazed upon this handsome
couple with their intricate steps which were timed with such effortless
and enviable accuracy, and excitedly believed that they were beholding
two distinguished specimens of what their home papers persisted in
calling New York's Four Hundred.

Maggie got back to her room with the feeling that she had staved off
Barney and her numerous other dilemmas for the immediate present. Her
chief thought in the many events of the day had been only to escape her
dangers and difficulties for the moment; all the time she had known that
her real thinking, her real decisions, were for a later time when she
was not so driven by the press of unexpected circumstances. That less
stressful time was now beginning.

What was she to do next? What were to be her final decisions? And what,
in all this strange ferment, was likely to germinate as possible forces
against her?

She mulled these things over for several days, during which Dick came to
see her twice, and twice proposed, and was twice put off. She had quiet
now, and was most of the time alone, but that clarity which she had
expected, that quickness and surety of purpose which she had always
believed to be unfailingly hers, refused to come.

She tried to have it otherwise, but the outstanding figure in her
meditations was Larry. Larry, who had not exposed her at the Sherwoods',
and whose influence had caused Hunt also not to expose her--Larry, who
without deception was on a familiar footing at the Sherwoods' where she
had been received only through trickery--La