"Fräulein Angelica is not up-stairs; I am all alone in the house. Tell me, for God's sake--"
He stopped suddenly; a horrible suspicion paralyzed his tongue.
The exhausted woman sank down on the pedestal of the great group, and wiped her eyes.
"The child--?" he asked at length, with great difficulty.
She looked up at him with supplicating eyes.
"Don't kill me! I don't know where it is--some one has taken it away--my anxiety drove me here--I have done all I can!--"
She seemed to expect nothing less than that he would strike her dead after hearing this confession.
But, as he stood motionless, she mustered up courage to tell him, in a disconnected way, what had happened. She had gone into the city after dinner, and her old mother had, as usual, taken charge of the children. Immediately after she went out--as if she had only been waiting for that--a strange lady had come to the house.
"Young, with blue eyes?" interrupted the sculptor, with difficulty unclinching his teeth.
No. An elderly lady, not far from fifty, dressed in black and heavily veiled. She asked for Frances, and said she was to bring her to Fräulein Julie, only for half an hour. It was a surprise they were preparing for the father, she said; Fräulein Angelica was going to make a sketch of the child; a drosky was waiting outside the door, and she asked the good grandmamma to put on the child's little cloak, but not to make any other change in its dress. The old woman, as soon as her deafness allowed her to catch the meaning of this story, had thought it rather strange, at first; but the explanation given by the stranger that Fräulein Angelica was prevented from coming and getting the child herself, by a slight cold she had caught on the evening before, had quieted her again. Besides, the child would be brought back in a couple of hours; Fräulein Julie would bring it home herself. As the stranger seemed to be so well acquainted with all the people and circumstances of which she spoke, the old woman could offer no reasonable objection. But the stranger had scarcely left the house when she was filled with an unaccountable anxiety, and had impatiently awaited her daughter's return.