who had known her, there was a great duty to
Larry Brainard which she must discharge. He was hunted by the police,
he was hunted by his former pals. And he was in his predicament
fundamentally because of her. Therefore, it was her foremost duty to
clear Larry Brainard.

Yes, she would do that first! Somehow!...

She was considering this problem of how she was to clear Larry, who
had tried to awaken her, who had shielded her, who loved her, when Dick
slowed his car down in front of the Grantham and helped her out. As he
said a subdued good-bye and was stepping back into his car, an impulse
surged up into her--an impulse of this different Maggie whose birth was
being attended by such bewildering emotions and decisions.

"Dick, won't you please come up for just a little while?"

Three minutes later they were in her sitting-room. Cap in hand Dick
awaited her words in the misery of silence. Her look was drawn, but
direct.

"Back in the road, Dick, you asked me why I couldn't marry you. I asked
you up here to tell you."

"Yes?" he queried dully.

"One reason is that, though I like you, I don't like you that way. The
more important reason to you is that I am a fraud."

"A fraud!" he exclaimed incredulously.

It had come to her, as she was leaving the car, that the place to start
her new life was to start right, or quit right, with Dick. "A fraud,"
she repeated--"an impostor. There is no Maggie Cameron. I am born of no
good family from the West. I have no money. I have always lived in New
York--most of the time down on the East Side. I used to work in a Fifth
Avenue millinery shop. Till three months ago I sold cigarettes in one of
the big hotels."

"What of that!" cried Dick.

"That is the nicest part of what I have to tell you," she continued
relentlessly. "My supposed relatives, Jimmie Carlisle and Barney Palmer,
are no relatives at all, but are two clever confidence men. I have been
in with them, working on a scheme they have framed. Everything I have
seemed to be, everything I have done, even this expensive apartment,
have all been parts of that scheme. The idea of that scheme was to
swindle some rich man out of a lot of money--through my playing on his
susceptibilities."

"Maggie!" he gasped.

"More concretely, the idea was to trick some rich man into falling in
love with me, to get him to propose, then to have me confess that I was
already married, but to a man who would give me a divorce if he were
paid