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.