THE voice sounded, fresh and brisk from behind the portals of the Fifty-Sixth Street eyrie. It was followed by a rapid succession of floppish noises which fell strangely upon the ears of Miss Maud Raines and Miss Helen Barrett, panting after their long ascent, outside the door. They had returned from a shopping tour at the unaccustomed hour of three when Darcy usually could rely upon having the place to herself.

“Isn't Darcy the gay young sprite!” said Helen as the song burst forth again.

“Flip-flop, flippity-floppity-flub” sounded in progression across the living-room floor.

The two fiancÉes looked at each other in bewilderment.

“What on earth!” said Maud Raines.

Again the voice was uplifted, in familiar melody, gemmed with words less familiar:

“I do believe she's doing it,” whispered Helen in awed accents.

The voice, with its strange accompaniments, resumed:

By this time Maud's key, silently inserted in the spring lock, had made connections. She threw the door open. Darcy, giving an imitation of a steam roller in full career toward the two entrants, was startled into a cry. She came to her feet with a bound, without pausing to touch so much as a finger to the floor, a detail which escaped the protruding eyes of her flatmates, and stood facing them flushed and defiant.

“Well!” said Maud Raines.

“What are you up to, Darcy?” asked Helen.

“Exercising,” said Darcy blandly.

“And practicing vocal music on the side,” remarked Maud.

“Oh, that's just for breathing,” exclaimed the girl.

“But what's it all about?” queried Helen. “I've gone into training.”

“You! What for?”

“Oh, I don't know. Just for fun.”

“You look it,” was Maud's grim commentary. “Who's training you?”

“Andy Dunne. He trained John L. Sullivan and Gloria Greene.”

“And which one are you modeling yourself on?” asked Maud maliciously.

“Oh, I'd rather be like Gloria, of course,” retorted Darcy easily. “But I feel more like John L.”

“I think it very clever of you, Darcy,” approved the kind-hearted Helen. “Englishmen are so athletic.”

Darcy seized upon the convenient suggestion. “Monty is crazy for me to be a real sport,” she said modestly.

“It's a good thing he can't see you learning,” remarked Maud.

“Did you ever know anything more pathetic!” said Helen, when they had withdrawn, leaving Darcy to resume her exercises.

“Pathetic! Driveling foolishness! Such a figure as she cuts! And it's all such a waste,” concluded Maud, complacent in her own bright-hued prettiness.

But a more discerning eye took a different view. Holcomb Lee, who hadn't seen Darcy for some weeks, had no sooner said, “Hello!” in his usual offhand way, when he came to call that evening, than he seized a pencil and demanded a sheet of paper.

“You're always drawing Darcy!” said Maud disdainfully.

“Just that curve from the ear down,” said he absently. “Something's happened to it.”

“What?” asked Maud.

“It's come true. The way I wanted it to be. Only better.”

He took Darcy into the corner, under the light, and sketched busily. As his quick glances appraised her, a look of puzzlement came into his eyes. He leaned forward, and with the inoffensive impersonality of the one-ideaed artist ran his hand lightly over her shoulder and down the arm.

“Moses!” said Holcomb Lee.

Darcy had flexed her upper arm and the long, slender muscles came up like iron.

“Training?” he asked.

Darcy nodded.

Again he regarded her subtly altered face. “What for? The chorus?”

“Haven't I been chorus long enough?” twinkled Darcy.

“I get you,” said Lee with emphasis. “You'll make the ingÉnue hustle for her job, whoever she is. By Jinks, it's a miracle!”

“But don't tell them,” said Darcy.

“Who? The girls? Haven't they noticed? Why, a blind man could feel the difference in you ten feet away.”

“You're the only one that has noticed it so far, and you're an artist.”

“Well, I suppose the girls wouldn't,” said the illustrator thoughtfully. “They see too much of you to recognize the change.”

What Andy Dunne's exercises had so obviously wrought in muscle and condition, Andy Dunne's discipline had accomplished for character. Imperceptibly even to herself, the inner Darcy was growing strong. One result was a new zest in her designing, taking the form of experiments aside from the beaten track which did not always meet the approval of B. Riegel, active head of B. Riegel & Sons, manufacturers of wall-paper. Now Mr. Riegel's approval, with the consequent check, was highly essential to Miss Darcy Cole's plans. And Miss Darcy Cole's attitude toward Mr. Riegel had always been acquiescent, not to say humble.

But on a particular morning, when the designer was even more alive than she was now accustomed to feel, she brought in a particular design, upon which she had spent much time and thought, and with which she was well content. Not so Mr. Riegel. Being first, last, and between times a man of business, he hardly gave a glance to the dowdy girl as she entered, but bestowed his entire attention on the sketch. “Too blank,” was his verdict.

“That makes it restful,” suggested Darcy. “Who wants restfulness? Pep! That's what goes these days.”

“It's for a sleeping-room, you know.”

For all the effect upon the wall-paper man she might as well not have spoken. He set two pencil cross-marks on the design.

“Ornamentation here, and here,” he directed curtly.

“I prefer it as it is,” said Darcy calmly.

Two months—yes, two weeks before—Darcy would have stepped meekly out and ruined her pattern by introducing the Riegel ornamentation. But all was different now. Andy Dunne's encomium, “because yah'r game,” had put fire in her blood. There was a reflection of it in her cheeks when Mr. Riegel looked up at her in surprise and annoyance. He saw the same familiar figure in the same shabby, ill-fitting clothes. But now she was standing up inside them. And she, whose dull regard formerly drooped away from the most casual encounter, was confronting him with bright and level eyes.

“Suppose you give my way a trial,” suggested this changeling.

“Mebbe you know more about this business than I do,” he challenged.

“Not at all. But it's my design, after all, isn't it?” said the girl pleasantly.

Gathering it up with hands which somehow suggested protectiveness against the Philistine blight of Mr. Riegel, she bestowed it safe in her imitation-leather roll. “I'll try to bring you another next week,” she promised.

“Wait, now, a minute!” cried the perplexed employer. “What're you going to do with this one?”

“Try it on Balke & Stover.”

“Leave it,” he ordered. “Check'll be sent.” He whirled around in his chair, presenting the broad hint of a busy back to her.

“Make it for thirty dollars, please,” said Darcy to the back.

Mr. Riegel performed a reverse whirl so much more swiftly than his swivel-chair was prepared for that it was thrown off its balance, and its occupant, with a smothered yelp, beheld himself orbitally projected toward a line of open sample paints waiting on the floor for a test. Mr. Riegel's own person was the last medium in the world upon which he desired to test them, for much stress had been laid upon their lasting quality. He was sprawling out, fairly above them, beyond human help, it seemed, when something happened. Darcy, standing in that attitude of unconscious but alert poise which rigid physical training inculcates, thrust forth a slender but powerful hand, caught the despairing Riegel, as it were in mid-flight, brought him up all standing, restored him to the chair and both of them to the status quo.

“Urf!” gasped the victim of these maneuvers. He bent a look upon Darcy which was a curious blend of wonder, skepticism, and respect. “Say,” he said, “you couldn't use a job in the trucking department, maybe?” Then, recovering himself, he growled: “What was that you said about thirty dollars?”

The growl had no effect. Darcy's confidence had been stiffened by the little interlude of the chair.

“My prices have gone up,” she informed him.

“The devil they have! Beg y' pardon, Miss Watchemame—”

“My name is Cole.”

“Miss Cole. Look-a-here, now; d' you think your work is worth ten dollars more than it has been?”

“Put it this way; I think you've been paying me ten dollars too little. Don't you?”

At bottom Mr. Riegel was a fair-minded as well as a shrewd person. Moreover, he had been tremendously impressed by the unsuspected physical prowess of this queer specimen. To catch him in mid-flight and reËstablish his equilibrium had required no mean quality of muscle. Yet this sloppy-looking girl had done it without turning a hair! And now she was striking him for a raise. He laughed aloud.

“That ain't the point,” said he. “I don't; but some of my competitors might. Lessay twenty-five for the next half-dozen: after that, thirty, and this one goes, as is.”

“Right!” said Darcy, composedly.

Exultant she went out into a dusk of wind and rain, such as would have swamped her spirit in misery aforetime, and fought her way joyously through it, ending her journey by taking the long flights of the apartment two steps at a time and singing as she sped. Outside the door she had noticed a taxi. In the front room she found Gloria, who had stopped on her way to the theater, stretched on the divan and talking with the turtledoves.

“I looked in to see how you were getting on,” said the actress, eyeing Darcy keenly.

“Splendidly!”

“Everything all right in the gymnasium? Did Andy—er—”

“Oh, yes. It's all right,” hastily broke in the girl, having no mind to hear her felonies discussed by her flat-mates. “Just as right as right can be.”

“You're awfully chirpy, considering what a beast of a raw, rainy day it's been,” observed Helen.

“Is it bad?” said Darcy blandly. “I suppose it is, but I hardly noticed.”

“Another British mail in, I suppose,” conjectured Maud. “That always brightens her up.”

“If there is I haven't got anything yet,” answered Darcy, who had neglected to consult the morning papers for the incoming steamship entries. Her myth involved so many supporting lies, that it was difficult and ticklish to keep it properly bolstered up.

“Has she told you about the Britisher, Gloria?” asked Helen.

“Monty Veyze? Of course. I know him.”

“You know him!” cried Helen and Maud in a breath. “What's he like?”

“Oh, he's all that Darcy thinks he is,” smiled Gloria. “It's years since I've seen him. To put it Englishwise, he was by way of being horribly smart, then. Just where is he now, Darcy?”

“Near the Siberian frontier,” said Darcy shortly. There was a gleam in Gloria's eye which she neither understood nor liked.

“In one of the twenty-two sub-wars that signalize the universal peace, I suppose,” laughed the actress. “Or is it twenty-nine.”

“I thought long engagements weren't the thing in England,” said Maud, musingly. “Particularly in these uncertain times when—when anything might happen.”

“I think that's pretty horrid of you, Maud,” retorted Darcy with carefully assumed sadness, smothering a private and murderous wish that “anything” would happen to her home-made fiancÉ.

“I don't mean it that way. But if I were really engaged to an Englishman on active service, I'd go over and marry him, on his very first leave.”

Casual though Maud's “really” sounded, it brought red to Darcy's cheeks and a livelier gleam to Gloria's eyes. The latter turned to Darcy.

“Why not tell them?”

“Tell them what?” inquired the girl, staring at her mentor in amaze and alarm.

“All about Monty. The whole thing. You know, I claim a partnership in him.”

By a mighty effort Darcy suppressed a gasp. What was Gloria up to, now?

“Go on,” the actress urged. “Tell them.”

“I-I can't,” stammered Darcy, which was exactly what the feminine Macchiavelli on the divan was maneuvering for.

“Shy?” said she, sweetly. “Very well, then. I'll tell them. May I?”

Receiving a dubious nod, Gloria proceeded:

“Sir Montrose Veyze has finally got his leave. He'll be here about the middle of October.” (That “gone” feeling came over Darcy.)

“By the 15th?” asked Helen eagerly. “In time for our wedding?”

“No. That's the unfortunate part. We hoped we could make it a triple wedding. That's the little surprise Darcy has been waiting to spring on you.”

“Can't he make it?” asked Maud. The notion of a titled adjunct to her marriage appealed strongly to her practical mind.

“Not quite. The best he can do is the 16th. Possibly later. So they'll be married quite quietly from my apartment and have a month's honeymoon before he goes back.”

To all of which Darcy listened in the stupefaction of despair. She was roused by Helen Barrett's bear-hug of congratulations.

“Do you know,” said Helen, “I haven't really quite been able to believe it up to now. Oh, Darcy, I'm so glad for you!”

With some faltered excuse for getting out of the room, the subject of this untimely felicitation escaped. Her brain seethed with horrid conjectures. Here was a furtherance of her phantom plans for which she was wholly unprepared. Doubtless Gloria had something in mind; but what could it be? When the day of inevitable reckoning should come, Darcy could see no adequate solution other than suicide or permanent disappearance. Meanwhile Gloria was putting her to the test of the severest judgment by asking her flat-mates:

“Don't you think Darcy looks well?”

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so likewise is the lack of it. Having become habituated to regarding their junior partner as aesthetically and femininely negligible, the other girls failed to appreciate the vital changes that were in progress. Miracles, set under our eyes, do not arrest us. Otherwise we should all stand about in stupefaction watching trees grow.

“She looks healthy,” granted Maud indifferently.

“And she's a lot more cheerful and lively,” added Helen. “But she'll always be—well, just Darcy.”

Being a scrupulously courteous person Miss Gloria Greene refrained from the prophetic comparison which suggested itself to her annoyed mind as appropriate, and contented herself with the inward retort:

“Oh, will she! Wait until I've dressed her. And then keep a watchful eye on your Holcomb Lees and your Paul Woods!”

On her way out Darcy pounced upon her. “Gloria! What have you let me in for? How am I ever going to get out of it?”

“Heaven knows!” returned the actress airily. “Don't __you know?”

“Haven't an idea. Sufficient unto the day is—”

“Unto all the rest of my days, I should think,” interrupted the dolorous Darcy.

“Engagements have to come to a head sometime, somehow,” pointed out Gloria.

“But you've made this so dreadfully definite!”

“Darcy, I had to! I just couldn't stand Maud's insinuation that you weren't really engaged—the cat! She as much as said that Montrose Veyze was just having a silly flirtation with you and that you took it au grand sÉrieux.”

“What if she knew the awful truth?”

“Don't be afraid. She won't.”

“How are we going to help it?”

“Break the engagement; there's one way. Say the word, Darcy, my child,” said Gloria striking a sacrificial attitude, “and I'll go across and gather in Monty Veyze, myself, for your sake.”

“Isn't there an obstacle on this side of the water?” suggested Darcy shyly, thinking of Jack Remsen.

Gloria reddened a little. “Not that any one knows of,” she returned.

“Anyway, if the engagement is broken, they'll say he jilted me.”

“Then jilt him.”

“They'd never believe it.”

“Probably not,” assented Gloria.

“And October is awfully near! I'll never dare show my face again,” wailed Darcy.

“Oh, I don't know,” returned the other reassuringly. “If it were your old face, now, you might be justified in not wanting to show it. Faces change, and we change with'em, as the prophet says.”

“It wasn't the prophet, and he didn't say that, anyway. He said, 'Times change, and—”

“—and faces change with'em, worse luck!” supplied the actress cheerfully. “Though all of'em don't change for the worse. Darcy, how much do you weigh?” she demanded with an abrupt change of tone to the business-like.

“One hundred and twenty-eight and a half, as I go on the gym floor.”

“That's good enough. 'The time has come,' the walrus said, 'to talk of many things; of shoes, and shirts, and chemisettes, of hats and eke stockings.'”

“Clothes!” cried Darcy, her eyes sparkling. “Clothes. Are you prepared, in the sight of heaven and earth, to spend seven or eight hundred of Aunt Sarah's hard-earned on a trousseau?”

“Oof! Don't say trousseau to me! It reminds me. Apart from that—try me!”

“All right. What are you going to do tomorrow at three?”

“Cover Central Park lengthwise and back in the even hour. Andy's orders.”

“Far be it from me to interfere. Make it the day after at ten o'clock in the morning. Meet me at my place. We'll have a sartorial orgy.” That night Darcy dreamed herself a princess.