While Larry had been speaking and moving away, Maggie had swiftly been appraising her father. His gray eyes were direct as against the furtiveness of Jimmie's; his mouth had a firm kindliness as against the wrinkled cunning of Jimmie's; his bearing was erect, self-possessed, as against Jimmie's bent, shuffling carriage. Maggie felt no swift-born daughter love for this stranger who was her father. The turmoil of her discovery filled her too completely to admit a full-grown affection; but she thrilled with the sense of the vast difference between her supposed father and this her real father.
In the meantime her father had spoken. Joe would have been more reserved with men or with older women; but with this girl, so much the sort of girl he had long dreamed about, his reserve vanished without resistance, and in its place was a desire to talk to this beautiful creature who came out of the world which the big white house represented.
“I have a daughter, yes,” he said. “But Larry—Mr. Brainard perhaps I should say—has likely told you all there is to tell.”
“I'd like to hear it from you, please—if you don't mind.”
“There's really not much to tell,” he said. “You know what I was and what happened. When I went to prison my daughter was too young to remember me—less than two years old. I didn't want her ever to be drawn into the sort of life that had been mine, or be the sort of woman that a girl becomes who gets into that life. And I didn't want her ever to have the stigma, and the handicap, of her knowing and the world knowing that her father was a convict. You can't understand it fully, Miss Cameron, but perhaps you can understand a little how disgraced you would feel, what a handicap it would be, if your father were a convict. I had a good friend I could trust. So I turned my daughter over to him, to be brought up with no knowledge of my existence, and with every reasonable advantage that a nice girl should have. I guess that's all, Miss Cameron.”
“This friend—what was his name?”
“Carlisle—Jimmie Carlisle. But his name could never have meant anything to you. Besides, he's dead now.”
Maggie forced herself on. “Your plan—it turned out all right? And you—you are happy?”
“Yes.” In the sympathetic atmosphere which this young girl's presence created for him, Joe's emotions flowed into words more freely than ever before in the company of a human being. Though he was answering her, what he was really doing was rather just letting his heart use its long-silent voice, speak its exultant dream and belief.
“Somewhere out in the world—I don't know where, and I don't want to know—my daughter has now grown into a wholesome, splendid young woman!” he said in a vibrant voice. Brooding in solitude so long upon his careful plan that he believed could not fail, had made the keen Joe Ellison less suspicious concerning it than he otherwise would have been—perhaps had made him a bit daffy on this one subject. “I have saved my daughter from all the grime she might have known, and which might have soiled her, and even pulled her down if I hadn't thought out in good time my plan to protect her. And of course I am happy!” he exulted. “I have done the best thing that it was possible for me to do, the thing which I wanted most to do! Instead of what she might have been, I have as a daughter just such a nice girl as you are—just about your own age—though, of course, she hasn't your money, your social position, and naturally not quite the advantages you have had. Of course I'm happy!”