A cry awful to hear broke from her lips.
"I suppose, Ida, it isn't the proper thing to keep a person in suspense," he cried. "You deserted your little child—never once sought to discover whether it were dead or alive. By the merest chance, I ran across it lately. I took possession of it, and I have it now."
"I can not, I will not believe you," she answered, quickly.
"Perhaps this will convince you," he said, reading aloud a letter from the superintendent of the foundling asylum where the child had been placed.
It gave a full account of all that could be ascertained of the hapless mother of the child. As he read by the light of the dark-lantern, she knew that it was all true.
Her child alive!
The rapture of the thought was drowned in the horror that it was in this man's possession.
She fell on her face in the long grass, mad with misery and despair.