“Jacqueline Japha!” Paula’s hands unclosed from his arm.
“She was in the large tenement house that burned first; that is her child whose loss she is mourning.”
“Jacqueline Japha!” again fell with an indescribable tone from Paula’s lips. “And who is that?” she asked, turning and indicating the silent figure by the wall.
“That is Roger Holt, the man who should have been her husband.”
“Oh, I remember him,” she cried; “and her, I remember her, and the little child too. But,” she suddenly exclaimed, “she told me then that she was not his mother.”
“And she did not know that she was; the man had deceived her.”
With a quick thrill Paula bounded forward. “Jacqueline Japha,” she cried, falling with outstretched hands beside the poor creature; “thank God you are found at last!”
But the woman was as insensible to this cry as she had been to all others. “My baby,” she wailed, “my baby, my own, own baby!”
Paula recoiled in dismay, and for a moment stood looking down with fear and doubt upon the fearful being before her. But in another instant a heavenly instinct seized her, and ignoring the mother, she stooped over the child and tenderly kissed it. The woman at once woke from her stupor. “My baby!” she cried, snatching the child up in her arms with a gleam of wild jealousy; “nobody shall touch it but me. I killed it and it is all mine now!” But in a moment she had dropped the child back into its place, and was going on with the same set refrain that had stirred her lips from the first.
Paula was not to be discouraged. Laying her hand on the child’s brow, she gently smoothed back his hair, and when she saw the old gleam returning to the woman’s countenance, said quietly, “Are you going to carry it to Grotewell to be buried? Margery Hamlin is waiting for you, you know?”