And neither father nor daughter having a guess of the truth.
Indeed it was a strange situation! A situation charged with all kinds of unforeseeable results.
The Duchess now understood the unfatherly disregard Old Jimmie had shown for the ordinary welfare of Maggie.

Not being her father, he had not cared.

Superficially, at least, Jimmie Carlisle must have been a much more plausible individual twenty years earlier, to have won the implicit trust of Joe Ellison and to have become his foremost friend.

She understood one reason why Old Jimmie had always boarded Maggie in the cheapest and lowest places; his hidden cupidity had thereby been pocketing about a thousand dollars a year of trust money for over sixteen years.
But there was one queer problem here to which the Duchess could not at this time see the answer.

If Jimmie Carlisle had wished to gratify his cupidity and double-cross his friend, why had he not at the very start placed Maggie in an orphanage where she would have been neither charge nor cost to him, and thus have had the use of every penny of the trust fund?
Why had he chosen to keep her by him, and train her carefully to be exactly what her father had most wished her not to be?
There must have been some motive in the furtive, tortuous mind of Old Jimmie, that now would perhaps forever remain a mystery.
Of course she saw, or thought she saw, the reason for the report of Old Jimmie's death to Joe Ellison.