m her, but no change in eye or look
accompanied them; nor could I catch a motion of her lips when she
presently added in a far-away tone inexpressibly affecting, "_Her_
history! Did he bid you say that?"

"Doctor Pool? He has given me no commands other than to find the child.
I am not here as an agent of his. I am here in Mr. Ocumpaugh's interest
and your own; with some knowledge--a little more knowledge than others
have perhaps--to aid me in the business of recovering this child. Madam,
the police are seeking her in the holes and slums of the great city and
at the hands of desperate characters who make a living out of the
terrors and griefs of the rich. But this is not where I should look for
Gwendolen Ocumpaugh. I should look nearer, just as you have looked
nearer; and I should use means which I am sure have not commended
themselves to the police. These means you can doubtless put in my hands.
A mother knows many things in connection with her child which she
neither thinks to impart nor would, under any ordinary circumstances,
give up, especially to a stranger. I am not a stranger; you have seen me
in Mr. Ocumpaugh's confidence; will you then pardon me if I ask what may
strike you as impertinent questions, but which may lead to the discovery
of the motive if not to the method of the little one's abduction?"

"I do not understand--" She was trying to shake off her apathy. "I feel
confused, sick, almost like one dying. How can I help? Haven't I done
everything? I believe that she strayed to the river and was drowned. I
still believe her dead. Otherwise we should have news--real news--and we
don't, we don't."

The intensity with which she uttered the last two words brought a line
of red into her gasping lips. She was becoming human, and for a minute I
could not help drawing a comparison between her and her friend Mrs.
Carew as the latter had just appeared to me in her little half-denuded
house on the other side of the hedge-row. Both beautiful, but owing
their charms to quite different sources, I surveyed this woman, white
against the pale green of the curtain before which she stood, and
imperceptibly but surely the glowing attractions of the gay-hearted
widow who had found a child to love, faded before the cold loveliness of
this bereaved mother, wan with suffering and alive with terrors of whose
depth I could judge from the clutch with which she still held my little
sketch.

Meanwhile I had attempted some kind of a