“Unfortunately, Donald, there is just enough truth in it to make it hurt,” said dad and I could see mother wince as if she had been struck, and turn away her face.
“They why—why? Oh! who am I?” I cried, for the whole thing had completely unnerved me.
“Don dear, we do not know to a certainty,” said mother struggling with her emotions.
“But now that you are partly aware of the situation, I think there is a way you can find out, at least as much as we know,” said dad, getting up and going into the library.
Through the doorway I could see him fumbling at the safe that he kept there beside the desk. Presently he drew out a battered and dented red tin box and a bundle of papers. These he brought into the dining room and laid on the table. Then he drew up a chair, cleared his throat, rather loudly it seemed to me, and began.
“Don, we always wanted a child, and why the Lord never blessed us with one of our own we do not know. Anyway, we wanted one so badly that we decided to adopt one. That was seventeen years ago, wasn’t it, mother?”
Mother nodded.
“Doctor Raymond, the physician at the county institution, knew our desires and, being an old friend of the family, he volunteered to find us a good healthy baby that we could adopt and call our own. Not a week later you appeared on the scene. Dr. Raymond told us that a wagon drawn by a raw-boned horse, and loaded with household goods, drew up to the orphanage and a tired and worn-out looking old lady got out with a lusty year old child in one arm and this box and these papers under the other.
“At the office of the asylum she explained how she and her husband were moving from a Connecticut town to a little farm they had bought in Pennsylvania. Somewhere at a crossroad near Derby, Connecticut, they had found the baby and this box and bundle of papers in a basket under a bush with a card attached to the basket requesting that the finder adopt and take care of the baby.
“Of course, they could not pass the infant by, but the woman explained that they were too poor and too old to adopt the child so they had gone miles out of their way to find an orphanage and leave the baby there, along with the box and papers.