The maid had been flirting with a policeman—she said she had only just turned her head—when the little darling had been snatched up by a stranger—a man with a black wig and bushy whiskers who got away with the child in spite of her pursuit.
On being cross-questioned, the maid admitted that the little girl had previously made the acquaintance of a blond gentleman with a melancholy aspect, and the two—Darling and the gentlemanly stranger—had become fast friends.
The little one would run to meet him, shouting with joy when he appeared, usually with a sweet bunch of flowers or a new toy. They would sit together on a bench a while, and Darling would prattle to him joyously, then with a long-drawn sigh he would leave the spot and reappear several days afterward, always meeting a glad welcome from the child. She did not think it was any harm as he seemed such a perfect gentleman. And she was sure it was not he who had kidnapped the child. It was a dark man, all bushy, black whiskers and wig.
The girl was lying; because she had been so busy with her flirtation that she did not know just when the child ran away to meet the blond gentleman beckoning from a distance, and threw herself into his arms. Then it was easy enough to whip into a carriage with her and away.
So the frightened nurse stuck to her story of the dark stranger, but the mother’s heart was not deceived. She knew that Darling’s abductor was no one but her father, who, cheated of her sweetness all these years, had thus taken his revenge.
For a while the most bitter resentment possessed the mother’s heart.
She employed detectives, and spared neither time, money, nor patience in the effort to recover the child.
For several years the search went on, ending at last without success.
Leon Dalrymple, who had placed his child with his sister, the wife of a poor artisan in an obscure part of the city, and then sailed for Europe himself, had so cleverly covered up his tracks that Mrs. Dalrymple’s daughter was reared in poverty in the same city where her mother was rolling in wealth, yet as effectively separated as if continents had rolled between them.
So the years went on, and Mrs. Dalrymple, plunging into the social whirl, tried to drown her grief in vain.