the affair
touched her so closely, this seemed to her the strangest situation she
had ever known. A father believing with the firm belief of established
certainty that his daughter had been brought up free from all taint of
his own life, carefully bred among the best of people. In reality the
girl brought up in a criminal atmosphere, with criminal ideas implanted
in her as normal ideas, and carefully trained in criminal ways and
ambitions. And neither father nor daughter having a guess of the truth.

Indeed it was a strange situation! A situation charged with all kinds of
unforeseeable results.

The Duchess now understood the unfatherly disregard Old Jimmie had shown
for the ordinary welfare of Maggie. Not being her father, he had not
cared. Superficially, at least, Jimmie Carlisle must have been a much
more plausible individual twenty years earlier, to have won the implicit
trust of Joe Ellison and to have become his foremost friend. She
understood one reason why Old Jimmie had always boarded Maggie in
the cheapest and lowest places; his hidden cupidity had thereby been
pocketing about a thousand dollars a year of trust money for over
sixteen years.

But there was one queer problem here to which the Duchess could not at
this time see the answer. If Jimmie Carlisle had wished to gratify his
cupidity and double-cross his friend, why had he not at the very start
placed Maggie in an orphanage where she would have been neither charge
nor cost to him, and thus have had the use of every penny of the trust
fund? Why had he chosen to keep her by him, and train her carefully to
be exactly what her father had most wished her not to be? There must
have been some motive in the furtive, tortuous mind of Old Jimmie, that
now would perhaps forever remain a mystery.

Of course she saw, or thought she saw, the reason for the report of Old
Jimmie's death to Joe Ellison. That report had been sent to escape an
accounting.

As she sat through the night hours the Duchess for the first time felt
warmth creep over her for Maggie. She saw Maggie in the light of a
victim. If Maggie had been brought up as her father had planned, she
might now be much the girl her father dreamed her. But Old Jimmie had
entered the scheme of things. Yes, the audacious, willful, confident
Maggie, bent on conquering the world in the way Old Jimmie and later
Barney Palmer had taught her, was really just a poor misguided victim
who should have had a far differen