第87章

When Maggie drove away with Dick from Cedar Crest--this was an hour before Gavegan descended out of the blue upon Larry and two hours before he rode triumphantly away with his captive--she was the most dazed and disillusioned young creature who had ever set out confidently to conquer the world. Courage, confidence, quickness of wit, all the qualities on which she had prided herself, were now entirely gone, and she was just a white, limp figure that wanted to run away: a weak figure in which swirled thoughts almost too spasmodically powerful for so weakened a vessel not to be shattered under their wild strain: thoughts of her amazingly discovered real father--of how she was the very contradiction of her father's dream--of Larry--of the cunning Jimmie Carlisle whom till this day she had believed her father--of Barney Palmer.

So agitated was she with these gyrating thoughts that she was not conscious that Dick had stopped the car on the green roadside until he had taken her hand and had begun to speak. The happy, garrulous, unobservant Dick had not noticed anything out of the way with her more than a pallor which she had explained away as being due to nothing more than a bit of temporary dizziness. And so for the second time Dick now poured out his love to her and asked her to marry him.

"Don't, Dick--please!" she interrupted him. "I can't marry you!

Never!"

"What!" cried the astounded Dick. "Maggie--why not?"

"I can't. That's final. And don't make me talk to you now, Dick--please! I cannot!"

His face, so fresh and happy the moment before, became gray and lined with pain. But he silently swung the car back into the road.

She forgot him utterly in what was happening within her. As they rode on, she forced herself to think of what she should do. She saw herself as the victim of much, and as guilty of much. And then inspiration came upon her, or perhaps it was merely a high frenzy of desperation, and she saw that the responsibility for the whole situation was upon her alone; she saw it as her duty, the role assigned her, to try to untangle alone this tangled situation, to try to measure out justice to every one.

First of all, as she had told Larry, her father's dream of her must remain unbroken. Whatever she did, she must do nothing that might possibly be a sharp blow to the conception of his daughter which were the roots and trunk and flowering branches of his present happiness. . . . And then came a real inspiration! She would, in time, make herself into the girl he believed her--make his dream the truth! She would get rid of Old Jimmie and Barney--would cut loose from everything pertaining to her former life--would disappear and live for a year or two in the kind of environment in which he believed he had placed her--and would reappear and claim him for her father! And for his own sake, he should never know the truth. Two years more and he should have the actuality, where he now had only the dream!

But before she was free to enter upon this plan, before she could vanish out of the knowledge of all 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 enough. The rich man would then drive a bargain with my supposed husband, pay over a lot of money--after which Barney, Old Jimmie, and I would disappear with our profits."

"Maggie!" he repeated, stupefied with his incredulous amazement. But the unflinching gaze she held upon him convinced him she was speaking the truth. "Then, if that was your game, why are you telling me now?

Why didn't you say 'yes' when I proposed a week ago? I would have fallen for the game; you would have succeeded."