“What!” she gasped.
“Listen, Maggie. What I'm going to tell you may seem unbelievable, but you've got to believe it, because it's the truth. I can see that you have proofs if you want proofs. But you can accept what I tell you as absolute facts. You are by birth a very different person from what you believe yourself. Your father is not Jimmie Carlisle. And your mother—”
“Larry!” She tensely gripped his arm.
“Your mother was of a good family. I imagine something like Miss Sherwood's kind—though not so rich and not having such social standing. She died when you were born. She never knew what your father's business actually was; he passed for a country gentleman. He was about the smoothest and biggest crook of his time, and a straight crook if there is such a thing.”
“Larry!” she breathed.
“He kept this gentleman-farmer side of his life and his marriage entirely hidden from his crook acquaintances; that is, from all except one whom he trusted as his most loyal friend. Before you were old enough to remember, he was tripped up and sent away on a twenty-year sentence.”
“And he's—he's still in prison?” whispered Maggie.
Larry did not heed the interruption. “He had developed the highest kind of ambition for you. He wanted you to grow up a fine simple woman like your mother—something like Miss Sherwood. He did not want you ever to know the sort of life he had known; and he did not want you to be handicapped by the knowledge that you had a crook for a father. He still had intact your mother's fortune, a small one, but an honest one. So he put you and the money in the hands of his trusted friend, with the instructions that you were to be brought up as the girls of the nicest families are brought up, and believing yourself an orphan.”
“That friend of his, Larry?” she whispered tensely.
“Jimmie Carlisle.”