“I’m not sorry, Shirley,—don’t think that—” Sidney shakily began. “But it is such a relief,—and I can’t quite stand it!”
“Come over here to your daddy,” said Mr. Thorne, drawing Sidney, big girl as she was, to his knee. “Now just have a little weep if you like. I’ll tell you how it happened after a while. Yes, Mother, you will have a rival in Mrs. Harcourt now; but some way I do not think that they will rob us of Sidney.”
Mr. Thorne smiled into the disturbed face of his wife. “Oh dear,” she said, “would he, Shirley?”
Shirley was just thinking of that herself, but she said, “My father will do what is best for everybody. He always does.”
“But how about your mother? Oh, your poor mother, never to have known of Sidney!”
At that Sidney, now wiping her eyes looked at Shirley and laughed. “I guess she had the better girl,” she said, “and here I have two mothers! Well, Twin, how about it?”
“I’m a little stunned,” replied Shirley, “but I seem always to have known it!”
“You may read the letters, my dear,” said Mr. Thorne, taking a small packet from his pocket and handing it to his wife. “I have just come from an interview with the writer. She will see us again if necessary.
“I think,” continued Mr. Thorne, “that I prefer to give you girls a brief outline of what happened rather than have you in touch with this person. She saw you girls together last winter, at the time of the mistake about the car. From what she said, she must have been worrying since then. I should say that ignorance and fear, with the lack of a strong sense of honor, were at the bottom of it all. The fact that no one by the name of Sampson had anything to do with this stopped my search for a while. That story was all made up, though not by the people who had our Sidney when we found her.
“A sudden impulse made a young and inexperienced nurse pick up one of the wee bundles of babies at a hospital and carry it a short distance down the street to an apartment where her older sister was delirious and calling for her baby that had died several weeks before. This woman, who is really responsible, was perplexed and troubled at first, but as the presence of the child seemed to have a good effect upon the sick woman, she encouraged its being kept for a few days, though this nurse had meant to keep it only a few hours. By the woman’s direction, after they had discovered that the baby was one of twins, the record was changed. As Mrs. Harcourt had not yet seen her babies and several odd calamities, to the people who knew, had happened, the deception was not discovered. Getting a baby back to the hospital was a risky performance after so long. They gave it up, though the woman for whose benefit they had stolen the child did not live.