Beside the fact that she ran a pawnshop, which was reputed to be also a fence, there were only two or three other facts that were known to her neighbors.  One was that in the far past there had been a daughter, and that while still a very young girl this daughter had disappeared.  It was rumored that the Duchess had placed the daughter in a convent and that later tire girl had married; but the daughter had never appeared again in the quarter.  Another fact was that there was a grandson, a handsome young devil, who had come down occasionally to visit his grandmother, until he began his involuntary sojourn at Sing Sing.  Another fact—­this one the best known of all—­was that two or three years before an impudent, willful young girl named Maggie Carlisle had come to live with her.

It was rather a meager history.  People wondered and talked of mystery.  But perhaps the only mystery arose from the fact that the Duchess was the kind of woman who never volunteered information about her affairs, and the kind even the boldly curious hesitate to question...

And down here it was, in this unlovely street, in the Duchess’s unlovely house, that the drama of Maggie Carlisle and Larry Brainard began its unpromising and stormy career:  for, though they had thought of it little, their forebears had been sowers of the wind, they themselves had sown some of that careless seed and were to sow yet more—­and there was to be the reaping of that seed’s wild crop.

CHAPTER II

When Maggie entered the studio on the Duchess’s third floor, the big, red-haired, unkempt painter roared his rebukes at her.  She stiffened, and in the resentment of her proud youth did not even offer an explanation.  Nodding to her father and Barney Palmer, she silently crossed to the window and stood sullenly gazing over the single mongrel tree before the house and down the narrow street and across the little Square, at the swirling black tide which raced through East River.  That painter was a beast!  Yes, and a fool!

But quickly the painter was forgotten, and once more her mind reverted to Larry—­at last Larry was coming back!—­only to have the painter, after a minute, interrupt her excited imagination with: 

“What’s the matter with your tongue, Maggie?  Generally you stab back with it quick enough.”

She turned, still sulky and silent, and gazed with cynical superiority at the easel.  “Nuts”—­it was Barney Palmer who had thus lightly rechristened the painter when he had set up his studio in the attic above the pawnshop six months before—­Nuts was transferring the seamy, cunning face of her father, “Old Jimmie” Carlisle, to the canvas with swift, unhesitating strokes.

“For the lova Christ and the twelve apostles, including that piker Judas,” woefully intoned Old Jimmie from the model’s chair, “lemme get down off this platform!”

“Move and I’ll wipe my palette off on that Mardi Gras vest of yours!” grunted the big painter autocratically through his mouthful of brushes.