"You'd like to see your real father?" he asked her.

"I think--I'd like to have a glimpse of him," she breathed.

Larry, just before this, had noted Joe Ellison in his blue overalls and
wide straw hat cleaning out a bank of young dahlias a distance up the
bluff. He now took Maggie's arm and guided her in that direction.

"See that man there working among the dahlias?--the man who once brought
you a bunch of roses? Joe Ellison is his name. He's the man I've been
talking about--your father."

He felt her quivering under his hand for a moment, and heard her breath
come in swift, spasmodic pants. He was wondering what was the effect
upon her of this climax of his revelation, when she whispered:

"Do you suppose--I can speak--to my father?"

"Of course. He likes all young women. And I told you that he and I were
close friends."

"Then--come on." She arose, clinging to him, and drew him after her.
Halfway to Joe she breathed: "You please say something first. Anything."

He recognized this as the appeal of one whose faculties were reeling.
There had never been any attempt here at Cedar Crest to conceal Joe
Ellison's past, and in Larry's case there had been only such concealment
as might help his evasion of his dangers. And so Larry remarked as Joe
Ellison took his wide hat off his white hair and stood bareheaded before
them:

"Joe, Miss Cameron knows who I really am, and about my having been in
Sing Sing; and I've just told her about our having been friends there.
Also I told her about your having a daughter. It interested her and she
asked me if she couldn't talk to you, so I brought her over."

Larry stood aside and tensely watched this meeting between father and
daughter. Joe bowed slightly, and with a dignified grace that overalls
and over fifteen years of prison could not take from one who during
his early and middle manhood had been known as the perfection of the
finished gentleman. His gray eyes warmed with appreciation of the young
figure before him, just as Larry had seen them grow bright watching the
young figures disporting in the Sound.

"It is very gracious for a young woman like you, Miss Cameron," he said
in a voice of grave courtesy, "to be interested enough in an old man
like me to want to talk with him."

Maggie made the supreme effort of her life to keep herself in hand.
"I wanted to talk to you because of something Mr. Brainard told me
about--about your having a daughter."

Larry felt that