the whole story, and then you will no
longer have any doubt regarding my identity," Mrs. Stewart remarked.
"After you left Rome with Anna Correlli, and I realized that I had
been abandoned, and my child left to the tender mercies of a world
that would not hesitate to brand her with a terrible stigma, for which
her father alone was to blame, I resolved that I would not live.
Grief, shame, and despair for the time rendered me insane, else I, who
had been religiously reared, with a feeling of horror for the
suicide's end, would never have dared to meditate taking the life that
belonged to God. I was not so bereft of sense, however, but that my
motherhood inspired me to make an effort to provide for my little one,
and I wrote an earnest appeal to my old schoolmate and friend, Edith
Allandale, who, I knew, would shortly be in Rome, asking her to take
the child and rear her as her own--"

"What! Then you did not try to drown the child as well as yourself!"
gasped Gerald Goddard, in an excited tone.

"No; had I done so, I should never have lived to tell you this story,"
said the woman, tremulously. "But wait--you shall learn everything, as
far as I know, just as it happened. Having written my appeal, which I
felt sure would be heeded, I took my baby to the woman who had nursed
me, told her that I had been suddenly called away, and asked her to
care for her until my return. She readily promised, not once
suspecting that a stranger would come for her in my place, and that it
was my purpose never to see her again. From the moment of my leaving
the woman's house--that last straw of surrendering my baby was more
than my heart and brain could bear--everything, with one exception,
was a blank to me until I awoke to consciousness, five weeks later, to
find myself being tenderly cared for in the home of a young man, who
was spending the winter in Rome for his health. His sister--a lovely
girl, a few years his senior--was with him, acting both as his nurse
and physician, she having taken her degree in a Philadelphia medical
college, just out of love for the profession. And she it was who had
cared for me during my long illness. She told me that her brother was
in the habit of spending a great deal of his time upon the Tiber; that
one evening, just at dusk, as he was upon the point of passing under a
bridge, a little way out of the city, he was startled to see some one
leap from it into the water and immediately sink. He shot his boat t