A father believing with the firm belief of established
certainty that his daughter had been brought up free from all taint of
his own life, carefully bred among the best of people. In reality the
girl brought up in a criminal atmosphere, with criminal ideas
implanted in her as normal ideas, and carefully trained in criminal
ways and ambitions. And neither father nor daughter having a guess of
the truth.
Indeed it was a strange situation! A situation charged with all kinds
of unforeseeable results.
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.
Pages:
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228