“No, darling,” said Cynthia; “he is not here; he has been gone away two years, and he had left off his baby curls and his dresses, and stopped playing with her for a year before that.” Cynthia sighed and drew down her mouth, and Ellen looked at her lovingly and wonderingly.
“Be you his mother?” she asked, piteously; then, before Cynthia could answer, her own lip quivered and she sobbed out again, even while she hugged her doll-child to her bosom, “I want my mother! I want my mother!”
All that day the struggle went on. Cynthia Lennox, leading her little guest, who always bore the doll, traversed the fine old house in search of distraction, for the heart of the child was sore for its mother, and success was always intermittent. The music-box played, the pictures were explained, and even old trunks of laid-away treasures ransacked. Cynthia took her through the hot-houses and gave her all the flowers she liked to pick, to still that longing cry of hers. Cynthia Lennox had fine hot-houses kept by an old colored man, the husband of her black cook. Her establishment was very small; her one other maid she had sent away early that morning to make a visit with a sick sister in another town. The old colored couple had lived in her family since she was born, and would have been silent had she stolen a whole family of children. Ellen caught a glimpse of a bent, dark figure at one end of the pink-house as they entered; he glanced up at her with no appearance of surprise, only a broad, welcoming expansion of his whole face, which caused her to shrink; then he shuffled out in response to an order of his mistress.
Ellen stared at the pinks, swarming as airily as butterflies in motley tints of palest rose to deepest carmine over the blue-green jungle of their stems; she sniffed the warm, moist, perfumed atmosphere; she followed Cynthia down the long perspective of bloom, then she said again that she wanted her mother; and Cynthia led her into the rose-house, then into one where the grapes hung low overhead and the air was as sweet and strong as wine, but even there Ellen wanted her mother.
But it was not until the next morning when she was eating her breakfast that the climax came. Then the door-bell rang, and presently Cynthia was summoned into another room. She kissed Ellen, and bade her go on with her breakfast and she would return shortly; but before she had quite left the room a man stood unexpectedly in the door-way, a man who looked younger than Cynthia. He had a fair mustache, a high forehead scowling over near-sighted blue eyes, and stood with a careless slouch of shoulders in a gray coat.
“Good-morning,” he began. Then he stopped short when he saw Ellen in her tall chair staring shyly around at him through her soft golden mist of hair. “What child is that?” he demanded; but Cynthia with a sharp cry sprang to him, and fairly pulled him out of the room, and closed the door.
Then Ellen heard voices rising higher and higher, and Cynthia say, in a voice of shrill passion: “I cannot, Lyman. I cannot give her up. You don't know what I have suffered since George married and took little Robert away. I can't let this child go.”
Then came the man's voice, hoarse with excitement: “But, Cynthia, you must; you are mad. Think what this means. Why, if people know what you have done, kept this child, while all this search has been going on, and made no effort to find out who she was—”
“I did ask her, and she would not tell me,” Cynthia said, miserably.
“Good Lord! what of that? That is nothing but a subterfuge. You must have seen in the papers—”