"Thank you. Go ahead."
"On Wednesday the nurse took Jack—the boy's name is Jack—to the Bois as usual. She played about with him on the grass for probably an hour. Then she sat down to rest. Jack was standing near her, playing with a rubber ball. She says—and, gentlemen, my wife cables me that she solemnly swears to the truth of her statements—that she turned away for a moment to observe passing vehicles in the road—turned back again to the child—and found that he was gone."
"Gone—but how?"
"How? That's the question. Here is this woman, sitting on the grass, with the child, a hundred yards from the road, in the middle of a large field of grass—a lawn. No one is within sight. The nearest person, it appears from her testimony, is the chauffeur, three hundred feet away, in the road. The woman turns her head for a moment, looks about—and the boy is gone. That is the story she tells, and which my wife has cabled to me. Do you wonder that I call it preposterous?"
"Hardly," remarked Duvall, with a grim smile. "The boy could not have vanished into thin air. The woman must be lying."
"That, Mr. Duvall, is what I cannot understand. I cannot believe that the woman is lying. My wife cannot believe it. She has been in our employ ever since the boy was born, and is devoted to him. Mrs. Stapleton cables that she is completely prostrated."
"But, Mr. Stapleton, you can hardly believe such a story! How could the child have been stolen, if her story is true? It is, as you say, preposterous."
"I do not say that the story is true, Mr. Duvall. I say that I do not think that Mary is lying. She is telling what she believes to be the truth. She turned her head for a moment—the boy was gone. That is what she says, and I believe her. The question is—how is it possible?"
"It isn't," Hodgman grunted.
"Everything is possible, Hodgman," said the banker, reprovingly. "The best proof of that, in this case, is that it has happened. What means were used, I cannot imagine; but the apparently impossible has happened. The boy is gone!"