excess of excitement has this natural
outcome. She did not have to play a part, the humiliation of her own
deed and the terrors yet to come were eating up her very soul. Then came
the blow, the unexpected, overwhelming blow of finding that the
deception planned with such care--a deception upon the success of which
the whole safety of the scheme depended--was likely to fail just for the
simple reason that a dozen men could swear that the child had never
crossed the track. She was dazed--confounded. Mrs. Carew was not by to
counsel her; she had her own part in this business to play; and Mrs.
Ocumpaugh, conscious of being mentally unfit for any new planning,
conscious indeed of not being able to think at all, simply followed her
instinct and held to the old cry in face of proof, of persuasion, of
reason even; and so, did the very wisest thing possible, no one
expecting reason in a mother reeling under such a vital shock.

But the cooler, more subtile and less guilty Mrs. Carew had some
judgment left, if her friend had lost hers. Her own part had been well
played. She had brought her nephew home without giving any one, not even
the maid she had provided herself with, in New York, an opportunity to
see his face; and she had passed him over, dressed in quite different
clothes, to the couple in the farm-wagon, who had carried him, as she
supposed, safely out of reach and any possibility of discovery. You see
her calculations failed here also. She did not credit the doctor with
even the little conscience he possessed, and, unconscious of his near
waiting on the highway in anxious watch for the event concerning which
he had his own secret doubts, she deluded herself into thinking that all
they had to fear was a continuation of the impression that Gwendolen had
not gone down to the river and been drowned.

When, therefore, she had acted out her little part--received the
searching party and gone with them all over the house even to the door
of the room where she said her little nephew was resting after his
journey--(Did they look in? Perhaps, and perhaps not, it mattered
little, for the bed had been arranged against this contingency and no
one but a detective bent upon ferreting out crime would have found it
empty)--she asked herself how she could strengthen the situation and
cause the theory advanced by Mrs. Ocumpaugh to be received,
notwithstanding the evidence of seeming eye-witnesses. The result was
the throwing of a second s