“But why haven’t you got him here! If you heard his dear little tongue calling you, Dick, why in the world didn’t you fly to him and seize him and bring him home to his almost distracted mother! Why didn’t you, Dick?” demanded Anna, ready to cry with an accession of vexation.
“My darling Anna, listen to me, will you? In the first place not having received your telegram, I had no suspicion whatever that Lenny was lost, else of course I should have been on the qui vive to find him, and should have followed the voice until I should have got possession of him. But when I first heard him calling me in his strong, cheerful, peremptory little tones, I looked around, fully expecting to see you, Drusilla, the boy and his nurse all come out in force to meet me at the station. But when I failed to see little Lenny or any of you, I considered myself the victim of an auricular illusion.”
“But you do not now?”
“No, indeed. I feel sure it was Lenny whom I heard calling me. And since you have told me of the abduction and of the detective policeman’s theory of it, I recall to mind the figure of a disreputable looking woman with a child in her arms hurrying out of sight in among the crowd. I remember that the woman’s back was towards me and that a shawl was thrown over the child’s head. I had but a glimpse of them as they slipped into the crowd.”
“Oh, Dick! Dick! if you had but known! What a fatality!”
“It was indeed. But now I must go and give this information into Scotland Yard, that the detectives may institute a thorough search in the neighborhood of the railway station where I saw him.”
“Shall I tell Drusilla?”
“Well, let me see:—No, not just yet. I must think about it first. It might increase her anxiety.”
“But it would assure her that her child is alive and well and in the city.”
“Yes; that is true. Yet you better not tell her until my return. She would be consumed with anxiety to see the one who had really seen and heard little Lenny, and to hear from him all about it. Don’t you understand?”