Mrs. Packard’s eyes opened wide with horror. She seized the paper and staggered with it to one of the windows. While she looked at it, I cast a glance at Letty. She was crying, from what looked like pure fear; but it was the fear of ignorance rather than duplicity; she appeared as much mystified as ourselves.
Meanwhile I felt, rather than saw, the old shadow settling fast upon the head of her who an hour before had been so bright. She had chosen a place where her form could not fail of being more or less concealed by the curtain, and though I heard the paper rattle I could not see it or the hand which held it. But the time she spent over it seemed interminable before I heard her utter a sharp cry and saw the curtains shake as she clutched them.
It seemed the proper moment to proffer help, but before either Letty or I could start forward, her command rang out in smothered but peremptory tones:
“Keep back! I want no one here!” and we stopped, each looking at the other in very natural consternation. And when, after another seemingly interminable interval, she finally stepped forth, I noted a haggard change in her face, and that her coat had been torn open and even the front of her dress wrenched apart as if she felt herself suffocating, or as if—but this alternative only suggested itself to me later and I shall refrain from mentioning it now.
Crossing the floor with a stumbling step, with the paper which had roused all this indignation still in her hand, she paused before the now seriously alarmed Letty, and demanded in great excitement:
“Who pinned that paper on my child? You know; you saw it done. Was it a man or—”
“Oh no, ma’am, no, ma’am,” protested the girl. “No man came near her. It was a woman—a nice-looking woman.”
“A woman!”
Mrs. Packard’s tone was incredulous. But the girl insisted.
“Yes, ma’am; there was no man there at all. I was on one of the park benches resting, with the baby in my arms, and this woman passed by and saw us. She smiled at the baby’s ways, and then stopped and took to talking about her,—how pretty she was and how little afraid of strangers. I saw no harm in the woman, ma’am, and let her sit down on the same bench with me for a few minutes. She must have pinned the paper on the baby’s coat then, for it was the only time anybody was near enough to do it.”