efinite about the Duchess except that she was shriveled and bent
and almost wordless and was seemingly without emotions. But of course
there were rumors. She was so old, and had been so long in the drab
little street, that she was as much a legend as a real person. No one
knew exactly how she had come by the name of "Duchess." There were
misty, unsupported stories that long, long ago she had been a shapely
and royal figure in colored fleshings, and that her title had been given
her in those her ruling days. Also there was a vague story that she had
come by the name through an old liking for the romances of that writer
who put forth her, or his, or their, prolific extravagances under the
exalted pseudonym of "The Duchess." Also there was a rumor that the
title came from a former alleged habit of the Duchess of carrying
beneath her shapeless dress a hoard of jewels worthy to be a duchy's
heirlooms. But all these were just stories--no more. Down in this
quarter of New York nicknames come easily, and once applied they adhere
to the end.

Some believed that she was now the mere ashes of a woman, in whom lived
only the last flickering spark. And some believed that beneath that drab
and spent appearance there smouldered a great fire, which might blaze
forth upon some occasion. But no one knew. As she was now, so she
had always been even in the memory of people considered old in the
neighborhood.

Beside the fact that she ran a pawnshop, which was reputed to be also a
fence, there were only two or three other facts that were known to her
neighbors. One was that in the far past there had been a daughter, and
that while still a very young girl this daughter had disappeared. It was
rumored that the Duchess had placed the daughter in a convent and that
later tire girl had married; but the daughter had never appeared again
in the quarter. Another fact was that there was a grandson, a handsome
young devil, who had come down occasionally to visit his grandmother,
until he began his involuntary sojourn at Sing Sing. Another fact--this
one the best known of all--was that two or three years before an
impudent, willful young girl named Maggie Carlisle had come to live with
her.

It was rather a meager history. People wondered and talked of mystery.
But perhaps the only mystery arose from the fact that the Duchess was
the kind of woman who never volunteered information about her affairs,
and the kind even the boldly curious hesitate to