It was also settled that on
the same day Mrs. Carew should bring home, from a certain small village
in Connecticut, her little nephew who had lately been left an orphan.
There was no deception about this nephew. Mrs. Carew had for some time
supplied his needs and paid for his board in the farm-house where he had
been left, and in the emergency which had just come up, she took care to
publish to all her friends that she was going to bring him home and take
him with her to Europe. Further, a market-man and woman with whom Mrs.
Carew had had dealings for years were persuaded to call at her house
shortly after three that afternoon, to take this nephew of hers by a
circuitous and prolonged ride through the country to an institution in
which she had had him entered under an assumed name. All this in one
day.

Meanwhile Mrs. Carew undertook to open with her own hands a passage from
the cellar of the bungalow into the long closed room behind the
partition. This was to insure such a safe retreat for the child during
the first search, that by no possibility could anything be found to
contradict the testimony of the little shoe which Mrs. Ocumpaugh
purposed presenting to all eyes as found on the slope leading to that
great burial-place, the river. Otherwise the child might have been
passed over to Mrs. Carew at once. All this being decided upon, each
waited to perform the part assigned her--Mrs. Carew in a fever of
delight--for she was passionately devoted to Gwendolen and experienced
nothing but rapture at the prospect of having this charming child all to
herself--Mrs. Ocumpaugh, whose only recompense would be freedom from a
threatening exposure which would cost her the only thing she prized, her
husband's love, in a condition of cold dread, relieved only by the
burning sense of the necessity of impressing upon the whole world, and
especially upon Mr. Ocumpaugh, an absolute belief in the child's death.

This was her first care. To this her mind clung with an agony of purpose
which was the fittest preparation possible for real display of feeling
when the time came. But she forgot one thing--they both forgot one
thing--that chance or Providence might ordain that witnesses should be
on the road below Homewood to prove that the child did not cross the
track at the time of her disappearance. To them it seemed enough to
plead the child's love for the water, her desire to be allowed to fish,
the opportunity given her to escape, and--t