ir wild strain: thoughts of her
amazingly discovered real father--of how she was the very contradiction
of her father's dream--of Larry--of the cunning Jimmie Carlisle whom
till this day she had believed her father--of Barney Palmer.

So agitated was she with these gyrating thoughts that she was not
conscious that Dick had stopped the car on the green roadside until
he had taken her hand and had begun to speak. The happy, garrulous,
unobservant Dick had not noticed anything out of the way with her more
than a pallor which she had explained away as being due to nothing more
than a bit of temporary dizziness. And so for the second time Dick now
poured out his love to her and asked her to marry him.

"Don't, Dick--please!" she interrupted him. "I can't marry you! Never!"

"What!" cried the astounded Dick. "Maggie--why not?"

"I can't. That's final. And don't make me talk to you now, Dick--please!
I cannot!"

His face, so fresh and happy the moment before, became gray and lined
with pain. But he silently swung the car back into the road.

She forgot him utterly in what was happening within her. As they rode
on, she forced herself to think of what she should do. She saw herself
as the victim of much, and as guilty of much. And then inspiration came
upon her, or perhaps it was merely a high frenzy of desperation, and she
saw that the responsibility for the whole situation was upon her alone;
she saw it as her duty, the role assigned her, to try to untangle alone
this tangled situation, to try to measure out justice to every one.

First of all, as she had told Larry, her father's dream of her must
remain unbroken. Whatever she did, she must do nothing that might
possibly be a sharp blow to the conception of his daughter which were
the roots and trunk and flowering branches of his present happiness.. ..
And then came a real inspiration! She would, in time, make herself into
the girl he believed her--make his dream the truth! She would get rid of
Old Jimmie and Barney--would cut loose from everything pertaining to her
former life--would disappear and live for a year or two in the kind of
environment in which he believed he had placed her--and would reappear
and claim him for her father! And for his own sake, he should never know
the truth. Two years more and he should have the actuality, where he now
had only the dream!

But before she was free to enter upon this plan, before she could vanish
out of the knowledge of all