Roma only waited to feel assured that the slumber was too profound to be disturbed by movement, and then she arose softly, carried the child into her own chamber, laid her on the bed, loosened her clothes, and left her fast asleep.
Then she returned to the sitting-room, where she found the lawyer still waiting for her.
She sat down beside him and said:
“Now, if you please, explain this affair to me, Mr. Merritt.”
The lawyer gave her a “brief” of the case.
“We already know by inference from the evidence collected at Goeberlin, that the child was chloroformed when she was snatched away from Goblin Hall. We also know that she was passed off, in her insensibility, as a sick child, fast asleep, and that Hanson took a small private compartment in the Pullman car for himself and the child. All this we know from what we heard from railway officials and others.”
“But afterward—afterward!” said Miss Fronde.
“Afterward, from what could be gathered from the child’s disjointed story, which, by the way, confirmed the truth of all the foregoing collected from Goeberlin, it seems that her abductor must have administered some narcotic to her in her food at some way station not far from Goeberlin. She must have slept all the way from the neighborhood of Goeberlin to New York City, for after she came to, after a long illness—for it seems she really was very ill when that fellow wrote to you——”
“Poor child! Poor, weary dove!” sighed Roma.
“When she came to herself,” resumed the lawyer, “after a dangerous illness, caused, no doubt, by the effects of the horrible drugs that had been given her, she had no sense of the time or space that had been passed since her abduction. She thought she had only been away a day or so, and that she was still in the neighborhood of Goblin Hall, and her one longing and one prayer was to be carried back to you.”