“It's true--I have been what you think me--I did go into this thing against Dick Sherwood,” Maggie responded in a voice that at first was faltering, then that stumbled rapidly on in her eagerness to pour out all the facts. “But--but Larry Brainard had kept after me--and finally he made me see how wrong I was headed. And then, this afternoon, before I spoke to you, Larry told me that you were my real father. When I learned the truth--how I had been cheated out of being something else--how I was the exact opposite of what you had wanted me to be and believed me to be--I felt about it almost exactly as you feel about it. I--I made up my mind to clear up at once all the wrong I was responsible for--and then disappear in such a way that you'd never have your dream of me spoiled. And so--and so this afternoon, after I left Cedar Crest, I confessed the whole truth to Dick Sherwood--about our plan to cheat him. And like the really splendid fellow he is, Dick Sherwood offered to help me set straight the things I wanted to set straight. Particularly to clear Larry Brainard. And so my being here as you find me is part of a plan between Dick Sherwood and myself. It's really a frame-up. A frame-up to catch Barney Palmer and Jimmie Carlisle.” “A frame-up!” ejaculated these two in startled unison. “How a frame-up?” demanded her father, no bit of the accusing harshness gone out of his voice. “Our plan against Dick Sherwood was to have him propose to me, then for me to confess that I was really married to a mean sort of man I didn't love--the idea being that Dick would be infatuated enough to pay a big sum to a dummy husband, and the three of us would disappear as soon as we got Dick's money. Dick offered to go through with the plan as Barney Palmer and Jimmie Carlisle had shaped it up--go through with it to-night--and then after money had passed, we'd have a criminal case against them. By reminding him that Larry Brainard knew just what we were up to, and might spoil everything if we didn't act at once, I got Barney Palmer worked up to the point where he was going to pose as my husband and take the money. Dick Sherwood was to come a little later, after he'd first telephoned me, with a big roll of marked money.” There were stuttered exclamations from Barney and Old Jimmie, which were cut off by the dominant incisiveness of Joe Ellison's words to his daughter: “I think you're lying to me! Besides, even if you're telling the truth, it's a pretty way you've taken to clear things up! Don't you see that by letting Dick Sherwood come here and play such a part, you'd be dead sure to involve him and his family in a dirty police story that the papers of the whole country would play up as a sensation? It's plain to any one that that's no way a person who wanted to square things would use Dick Sherwood. And that's why I think you're lying!”