“Yes, yes,” returned Alice; “but some person must have recommended her, and if you can ascertain who that person was, you may find Mrs. Merton, and learn something of Marian.”
“I wonder I never thought of that before,” said Frederic, adding, “that if Alice had her sight he believed she would have discovered Marian ere this.”
“I know I should,” was her answer; and after a little further conversation, it was decided that Frederic should go to New York, and learn, if possible, who first suggested Mrs. Merton as a nurse.
This was not so easy a matter as he had imagined it to be, for though Frederic himself was well remembered at the hotel, where he was now a frequent guest, scarcely any one could recall Mrs. Merton distinctly, and no one seemed to know how she came there, until a servant, who had been in the house a long time, spoke of Martha Gibbs, and then the proprietor suddenly remembered that she had recommended Mrs. Merton as being a friend of hers.
“But who is Martha Gibbs, and where is she now?” Frederic asked; and the servant replied that
“Her home used to be in Woodstock, Conn.;” and with this item of information Frederic wrote to her friends, inquiring where she was.
To this letter there came ere long an answer, saying that Mrs. John Jennings lived in ——, a small town in the interior of Iowa. Accordingly the next mail westward from Yonkers carried a letter to said Mrs. Jennings, asking where the woman lived who had nursed Mr. Raymond through that dangerous fever. This being done, Frederic and Alice waited impatiently for a reply, which was long in coming, for Mr. Jennings’ log tenement was several miles from the post-office, where he seldom called, and it was more than a week ere the letter reached him. Even then it found him so engrossed in the arrival of his first-born son and heir, that for two or three days longer it lay unopened in the clock-case, ere he thought to look at it.
“I don’t know what it means, I’m sure,” he said, taking it to his wife, who, having never heard of the death of her old friend, replied, “Why, he wants to know where Mrs. Burt lives. Just write on a piece of paper: ‘East —— street, No. —, third story; turn to your right; door at the head of the stairs.’ I wonder if he’s never been there yet?”
John was not an elaborate correspondent, and he simply wrote down his better half’s direction, saying nothing whatever of Mrs. Burt herself, and thus conveying to Frederic no idea that Merton was not the real name.
“A letter from Iowa,” said Frederic to Alice, as he came in from the office, on the very night when Marian was walking slowly past what was once her home. “I have the street and number, and to-morrow I am going there.”