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.”

Not till that moment did Maggie realize the full truth; not till then did she realize the solid influence Larry Brainard had been in the background of her life all these months.