He recognized this as the appeal of one whose faculties were reeling.  There had never been any attempt here at Cedar Crest to conceal Joe Ellison’s past, and in Larry’s case there had been only such concealment as might help his evasion of his dangers.  And so Larry remarked as Joe Ellison took his wide hat off his white hair and stood bareheaded before them: 

“Joe, Miss Cameron knows who I really am, and about my having been in Sing Sing; and I’ve just told her about our having been friends there.  Also I told her about your having a daughter.  It interested her and she asked me if she couldn’t talk to you, so I brought her over.”

Larry stood aside and tensely watched this meeting between father and daughter.  Joe bowed slightly, and with a dignified grace that overalls and over fifteen years of prison could not take from one who during his early and middle manhood had been known as the perfection of the finished gentleman.  His gray eyes warmed with appreciation of the young figure before him, just as Larry had seen them grow bright watching the young figures disporting in the Sound.

“It is very gracious for a young woman like you, Miss Cameron,” he said in a voice of grave courtesy, “to be interested enough in an old man like me to want to talk with him.”

Maggie made the supreme effort of her life to keep herself in hand.  “I wanted to talk to you because of something Mr. Brainard told me about—­about your having a daughter.”

Larry felt that this was too sacred a scene for him to intrude upon.  “Would you mind excusing me,” he said; “there are some calculations I’ve got to rush out”—­and he returned to the bench on which they had been sitting and pretended to busy himself over a pocket notebook.

While Larry had been speaking and moving away, Maggie had swiftly been appraising her father.  His gray eyes were direct as against the furtiveness of Jimmie’s; his mouth had a firm kindliness as against the wrinkled cunning of Jimmie’s; his bearing was erect, self-possessed, as against Jimmie’s bent, shuffling carriage.  Maggie felt no swift-born daughter love for this stranger who was her father.  The turmoil of her discovery filled her too completely to admit a full-grown affection; but she thrilled with the sense of the vast difference between her supposed father and this her real father.

In the meantime her father had spoken.  Joe would have been more reserved with men or with older women; but with this girl, so much the sort of girl he had long dreamed about, his reserve vanished without resistance, and in its place was a desire to talk to this beautiful creature who came out of the world which the big white house represented.

“I have a daughter, yes,” he said.  “But Larry—­Mr. Brainard perhaps I should say—­has likely told you all there is to tell.”

“I’d like to hear it from you, please—­if you don’t mind.”