at
Hannigan would not burst forth and ruin what was yet to come. Since that
door unluckily had to be unlocked, her one chance was given her by the
presence of Larry. Perhaps Larry could perceive the larger things she
was striving for, and in some way restrain Hannigan.

These thoughts were but an instant in passing through her brain.
Barney's eyes came back from the outer door to her face. "That's not Old
Jimmie yet."

"No," her lips said. But her brain was saying, since the crack still
remained a half-inch crack, "Larry understands--he's holding back Red
Hannigan!"

Barney returned swiftly to his charge. "How about Toronto, Maggie--say
exactly seventy-two hours from now--the Royal Brunswick Hotel?"

Maggie realized she could no longer put him off if she were to keep
him unsuspicious for the next hour. Besides, in her desperate
disillusionment concerning herself, she did not care what happened to
her, or what people might think of her, if only she could keep this play
going till its final moment.

"Yes," she said--"if we each feel the same way toward each other when
this evening's ended."

"Maggie!" he cried. "Maggie!" This time, when he exultantly caught at
her hand, she dared not refuse it to him. And she felt an additional
loathing for Barney's caress because she knew that Larry was a witness
to it.

Indeed, it was difficult for Larry, at the sight of Maggie's hand in
Barney's too eager palms, to hold himself in check; and to do this in
addition to holding in check the slight, quivering Red Hannigan, whose
collar and whose right wrist he had been gripping these last three
minutes. For Larry, as Maggie had hoped, had dimly apprehended something
of Maggie's plan, and he felt himself bound by the promise she had
extracted from him, to let her go through with whatever she had under
way; though he had no conception of her plan's extent, and could, of
course, not know of the intention of her overwrought mind to give her
plan its final touch in what amounted to her own self-destruction, and
in her vanishing utterly out of the knowledge of all who knew her.

Another minute passed; then Larry heard three peculiar rings of the bell
of the outer door--an obvious signal. Maggie answered the summons,
and Larry saw Old Jimmie enter. There followed a rapid and compact
conference between the three, the substance of which was the telling of
Old Jimmie of the developments against Dick Sherwood which Maggie had
a little earl