u for the way I treated you late this afternoon. As I
said, I've just had a talk with Dick and he's told me everything--except
some things we may all have to tell each other later. I was entirely
in the wrong, and you were entirely in the right. And the way you've
handled things seems to have given Dick just that shock which you said
he needed to awaken him to be the man it's in him to be. I'm sure we all
congratulate you."

She gave Larry no chance to respond. She knew the danger, in such an
emotional crisis as this, of any let-up. So she went right on in her
brisk tone of ingratiating authority.

"I guess we've all been through too much to talk. You are all coming
right home with me. Mr. Brainard and Mr. Ellison live there, I'm their
boss, and they've got to come. And you've got to come, Miss Ellison, if
you don't want to offend me. I won't take 'no.' Besides, your place is
near your father. Wear what you have on; in a half a minute you can put
enough in a bag to last until to-morrow. To-morrow we'll send in for
the rest of your things--whatever you want--and send a note to your Miss
Grierson, paying her off. You and your father will have my car," she
concluded, "Mr. Brainard and Dick will ride in Dick's car, and Mr. Hunt
will take me."

And as she ordered, so was it.

For fifteen minutes--perhaps half an hour--after it rolled away from
the Grantham Hotel there was absolute stillness in Miss Sherwood's
limousine, which she had assigned to Maggie and her father. Maggie was
near emotional collapse from what she had been through; and now she
was sitting tight in one corner, away from the dark shadow in the other
corner that was her newly discovered father who had cared for her so
much that he had sought to erase from her mind all knowledge of his
existence. She wanted to say something--do something; she was torn with
a poignant hunger. But she was so filled with pulsing desires and fears
that she was impotent to express any of the million things within her.

And so they rode on, dark shadows, almost half the width of the deeply
cushioned seat between them. Thus they had ridden along Jackson Avenue,
almost into Flushing, when the silence was broken by the first words
of the journey. They were husky words, yearning and afraid of their own
sound, and were spoken by Maggie's father.

"I--I don't know what to call you. Will--will Maggie do?"

"Yes," she whispered.

"I'm--I'm not much," the husky voice ventured on; "b