“The Notary is in bed—you shot him! Don’t you think it is doing you a good turn not to have you arrested?”
“It was an accident.”
“Oh no, it wasn’t! You couldn’t make a jury believe that. And if you were in prison, how could you find your child? You see, you have treated the Notary very badly.”
She was silent, and he added, slowly: “He had good reasons for not telling you. It wasn’t his own secret, and he hadn’t come by it in a strictly professional way. Your child was being well cared for, and he told you simply that it was alive—for your own sake. But he has changed his mind at last, and—”
The woman sprang from her seat. “He will tell me—he will tell me?”
“I will tell you.”
“Monsieur-Monsieur—ah, my God, but you are kind! How should you know—what do you know?”
“I give you my word that by to-morrow evening you shall know where your child is.”
For a moment she was bewildered and overcome, then a look of gratitude, of luminous hope, covered her face, softening the hardness of its contour, and she fell on her knees beside the table, dropped her head in her arms, and sobbed as if her heart would break.
“My little lamb, my little, little lamb-my own dearest!” she sobbed. “I shall have you again. I shall have you again—all my own!”