It was filled with yellowing relics of a bygone day, and he turned them over rapidly, saying to Sophie:
"I am searching for something to prove a suspicion of mine—a suspicion of a deadly wrong!"
She dried her eyes and looked on with womanly curiosity, while he picked up and shook a little red box in the bottom of the trunk.
A dozen or two trinkets and letters fell out on the floor, and he searched them eagerly over, lighting at last on a slender golden necklace belonging to an infant.
He held it with a shaking hand, saying to Sophie:
"See this little clasp forming in small diamonds the word 'Baby'? It belonged to my wife in infancy, and when our little Roma was born she clasped it on her neck."
"And Granny Jenks has stolen it!" she cried indignantly.
"Worse than that! She stole also the child that wore it!" he answered, with a burst of the bitterest despair.
His heart was breaking with its burden of concealed misery, and Sophie's eager, respectful sympathy drew him on till he could not resist the temptation to tell her all, sure of her sympathy.
It was like reading a novel to Sophie—the story of the lost babe, the spurious one substituted, and all that had happened since to the present moment.