"It is too bad."
"In one way it is my own fault. I drove my niece from my house by my harshness. I sincerely wish she was back."
"If it was your fault, as you say, why not send for her?"
"I do not know where to send. Mr. Bulson heard she went to Boston, and he is going to advertise for her in some Boston papers. Poor Gertrude!"
"That was her name?"
"Yes, Gertrude Horton. She was my brother's child. I wanted her to marry my nephew, and we had a bitter quarrel, and after that there was a robbery, and—but I am satisfied now that Gertrude was innocent."
"Why, it seems to me I've heard something of this before!" exclaimed the nurse. "The story came to me through a friend who knows an old woman who keeps a fruit-and-candy stand on the Bowery. She said the girl was driven away from home because her uncle wanted her to marry a man she didn't want, and because the uncle thought she had robbed his safe—she and a boy who happened to call at the house about that time."
"It must be my Gertrude!" said Mark Horton. "And did she marry that actor fellow?"
"He wasn't an actor. He's a newsdealer—keeps a stand with a man, somewhere uptown; and he's not old enough to marry."