“Er-huh,” said the nursemaid, staring hard at her. “Just a minute ago—goin’ up that way, to the entrance, walking terrible fast.”
“Oh, Heavens!” cried Miss Mackellar, ashen white. “Oh, stop them, somebody! The child has been kidnaped!”
The nursemaid also turned pale.
“Oh, my!” she exclaimed. “I never! Then I’d better get this baby home, quick as ever I can!”
And she set off with her perambulator at a dangerous rate of speed.
The luckless Miss Mackellar stood in the middle of the path, clasping her trembling hands, and trying in vain to make her panic-stricken brain function lucidly.[Pg 250] What she really wanted to do was to scream.
“No, no!” she said to herself. “I must keep calm. Oh, there’s a policeman! But I don’t know—perhaps that’s the wrong thing to do. It might get into the newspapers, if I tell a policeman, and Mr. Donalds is always so angry at newspapers. Oh! Oh! If they had only come to me and told me they were going to steal the child, I’d have been glad to draw all my money out of the savings bank and hide it under a tree for them! That’s what they always seem to want some one to do. Of course I know I wouldn’t have enough, but—oh, my precious Natalie! Oh, Mr. Donalds! Oh, my poor darling Natalie!”
She began to cry.
“I’ll go to Mr. Donalds this instant,” she thought. “I don’t care what happens to me. Let them put me in jail—that’s where I ought to be! It’s all my fault!”
Off she went, as fast as her shaking knees and her fluttering heart permitted; and this is her last personal appearance in this story, for any account of her interview with her employer would be too painful to set before a humane reader.