"That must be a comfort to you in the trial you've had to face."
"It hasn't been a trial exactly, because you bear a trial and live through it. This has been spending every day and every night in the lake of fire and brimstone. I wonder if you've any idea of what it's like."
"I don't suppose I have."
"If you did have—" He thought she was going to say that if he did have he would allow himself to become the Whitelaw baby in order to relieve her anguish, but she struck another note. "I hadn't the least suspicion of what had been done to me till the two footmen had lifted the little carriage up over the steps and into the hall. Then I raised the veil to take my baby out, and I—I fell in a dead swoon."
He waited for her to go on again.
"Try to imagine what it is to find in place of the living child you've laid in its bed with all the tenderness in your soul—to find in place of that a dirty, ugly, stuffed thing, about a baby's size.... For days after that I was just as if I was drugged. If I came to for a few minutes I prayed that I mightn't live. I didn't want to look the mother and father in the face."
"But hadn't you told them anything about it?"
"There was nothing to tell. The baby had vanished. I'd seen nothing; I'd heard nothing. Neither had my friend who was with me, and who's married now, in England. If an evil spirit had done it, it couldn't have been silenter, or more secret. It was a mystery then; it's been a mystery ever since."
"But you raised an alarm? You made a search?"