Mrs. Ansley computed. "It was while we were on our honeymoon. Don't you remember? We read it in the paper at Montreal, after we'd come from Niagara Falls. That was the fifteenth of May, and Harry had been stolen on the tenth."
Tom felt a queer sick sinking of the heart. The tenth of May was the last of the three dates his mother had fixed as his birthday. She had told him, too, that the day when he was born was one on which the nursemaids were in the Park, and the lilacs had been in bloom. Why this specification? If, as she had informed him at other times, he was born in the Bronx, where Gracie also had been born, why the reference to the Park and nursemaids, five miles away? He listened avidly.
"How old would that make him if he were living now?"
Again Mrs. Ansley reckoned. "Something over nineteen. I've forgotten just how many months he was when he disappeared."
Tom was reassured. He was only eighteen; he was positive of that. He couldn't have been nineteen without ever suspecting it. Mr. Ansley continued.
"Seems to me a great mistake to bring him back now, even if they found him. A lumbering fellow of nineteen, practically a man, with probably the lowest associations."
"That's what Onora feels. She's told me so. She couldn't go through it. Even if he isn't dead in fact he's dead to them."
"Henry feels that, of course. He doesn't deny it. He doesn't want him back—not now. At the same time when any new will o' the wisp starts up he can't help feeling—"
Tom was back in his little hall bedroom, after the run in the car with Guy, before he had time to think these scraps of conversation over. The details for which he had to render an account were, first, his sickening sense of dread on learning that the Whitelaw baby had been stolen on the tenth of May, and, then, his relief that the child, if now alive, would be nineteen years of age. These sensations or emotions, whatever they might be called, had been independent of his will. What did they portend? Why was he frightened in the one case, and in the other comforted?