But for her to be under the influence of the worst crook of all, a stool, a cunning traitor to his own friends--that was more than could possibly be stood! In his rage in Maggie's behalf he forgot for the moment the many evils Barney had done to himself.

He thought of wild, incoherent, vaguely tremendous plans.

First he would get Maggie away from Barney and Old Jimmie--somehow.

Then he would square accounts with those two--again by an undefined somehow.
Presently the tired, impersonal voice of the Grantham operator remarked against his ear-drum: "Miss Cameron don't answer." "Have her paged, please," he requested.
Larry, of course, could not know that his telephone call was the very one which had rung in Maggie's room while Barney and Old Jimmie were with her, and which Barney had harshly forbidden her to answer.
Therefore he could not know that any attempt to get Maggie by telephone just then was futile.
When he came out of the booth, the impersonal voice having informed him that Miss Cameron was not in, it was with the intention of calling Maggie up between eight and nine when she probably would have returned from dinner where he judged her now to be.

He knew that Dick Sherwood had no engagement with her, for Dick was to be out at Cedar Crest that evening, so he judged it almost certain Maggie would be at home and alone later on.
Having nothing else to do for an hour and a half, he thought of a note he had received from the Duchess in that morning's mail asking him to come down to see her when he was next in town.