The Duchess now understood the unfatherly disregard Old Jimmie had shown for the ordinary welfare of Maggie.  Not being her father, he had not cared.  Superficially, at least, Jimmie Carlisle must have been a much more plausible individual twenty years earlier, to have won the implicit trust of Joe Ellison and to have become his foremost friend.  She understood one reason why Old Jimmie had always boarded Maggie in the cheapest and lowest places; his hidden cupidity had thereby been pocketing about a thousand dollars a year of trust money for over sixteen years.

But there was one queer problem here to which the Duchess could not at this time see the answer.  If Jimmie Carlisle had wished to gratify his cupidity and double-cross his friend, why had he not at the very start placed Maggie in an orphanage where she would have been neither charge nor cost to him, and thus have had the use of every penny of the trust fund?  Why had he chosen to keep her by him, and train her carefully to be exactly what her father had most wished her not to be?  There must have been some motive in the furtive, tortuous mind of Old Jimmie, that now would perhaps forever remain a mystery.

Of course she saw, or thought she saw, the reason for the report of Old Jimmie’s death to Joe Ellison.  That report had been sent to escape an accounting.

As she sat through the night hours the Duchess for the first time felt warmth creep over her for Maggie.  She saw Maggie in the light of a victim.  If Maggie had been brought up as her father had planned, she might now be much the girl her father dreamed her.  But Old Jimmie had entered the scheme of things.  Yes, the audacious, willful, confident Maggie, bent on conquering the world in the way Old Jimmie and later Barney Palmer had taught her, was really just a poor misguided victim who should have had a far different fate.

And now the Duchess came to one of the greatest problems of her life.  What should she do?  Considering the facts that Joe Ellison wished the life of a recluse and desired to avoid all talk of the old days, the chances were that he would never happen upon the real state of affairs.  Only she and Old Jimmie knew the essentials of the situation—­ and very likely Jimmie did not yet know that the friend who had once trusted him was now a free man.  She felt as though she held in her hands the strings of destiny.  Should she tell the truth?

She pondered long.  All her considerations were given weight according to what she saw as their possible effect upon Larry; for Larry was the one person left whom she loved, and on him were fixed the aspirations of these her final years.  Therefore her thoughts and arguments were myopic, almost necessarily specious.  She wanted to see justice done, of course.  But most of all she wanted what was best for Larry.  If she told the truth, it might result in some kind of temporary breakdown in Maggie’s attitude which would bring her and Larry together.  That