"You may well ask that. My name was lost. I suppose, hearing me called Sal's Kid, they mistook that for Sal Kidd. Any way they registered my name on the books of the Island as Sarah Kidd."
Victor laughed at this piece of ingenuity on the part of the authorities, and again expressed wonder as to how her grandfather ever found her.
"If I were a heathen, I should say he found me by chance. It looked like it. You see, he had met with misfortunes. His wife—my grandmother—died. And he was growing old, and his home was lonely and his life was dreary. And so he relented toward his poor daughter, and even toward her husband."
"But too late!" put in Victor.
"Yes; too late. He relented too late," sighed Electra. "He went to New York, where they had been living when he had last heard of them, and after making the most diligent inquiries he only learned that they had been dead several years, and had left an orphan girl in great destitution. Well, he advertised for the child, offering large rewards for her discovery."
"But in vain, I suppose?" said Victor.
"Ah, yes, in vain, for I was at Randall's Island, registered under another name."
"The case seemed hopeless," said Victor.
"Entirely hopeless. And then, partly from his disappointment and partly from seeing so much of suffering among children, he became a sort of city missionary. It was in his character of missionary that he went one day to an examination of the pupils of the girls' school on Randall's Island. There he saw me, and recognized me by my striking likeness to my mother. Indeed he has since told me that I am a counterpart of what my mother was at my age."
"And your face is such a very peculiar and, I may say, unique face, that the likeness could not have been accidental, I suppose," observed Victor.