A really interesting film, with many bright directorial features and happy moments for what concerns witly shots and lively cutting. All is biased, notwithstanding, with a big sharp unanswered question. Here it is:
Why doesn't she (Mariam Hardy) tell sooner her daughter (Betty) that she is her mother? Ok, 15 years before Mariam was reduced to not properly begging on the streets, but more precisely to fraudolent begging, being part of a racket of criminals who deceived people into letting them think they were blind persons, or persons with other disabilities: she found no better way (why?), didn't want her daughter to know of her beggar mother, and assigned the little child as an orphan to a highly distinguished school, whose tuition fees - during the whole 15 years - were regularly paid by a "close-mouthed attorney" (with whose funds?).
But we soon see Mariam much better established in life, sharing a luxury home with her co-conman Toby, and we see Mariam now - far from the (fake) beggars times - as a leading figure of a much honourable "lady commitee for organized charities". Those kind of things are not made in a day. Why, then, not tell Betty, why doesn't Mariam eventually take back her daughter, now that everything is OK? We don't know. We aren't told. We can only guess. Maybe the inexplicabile fortune made by the false beggars' racket, with evidently fraudolent means, is - as it should be - a crime, and Mariam and co. Don't want the police to interfere.
If that is the case, why does the chief of police himself not only help Mariam in finding a murderer (yes, there has been a murder, at the start), but even wants, at the end, to make love to (and maybe) marry Mariam? Why Betty, at the end, welcomes her mother instead of accusing her to have abandoned her for so many years? We really cannot tell.