“It’s a child crying. It’s just outside the door.”
“It sounds like Jean.”
“Nonsense, my dear!”
But Anne switched on the light and went to see for herself; and there, in the tiny anteroom that separated the bedroom from the corridor, she found the basket—a new Pharoah’s daughter before a new little Moses in the bulrushes. In bewilderment she brought the ark into the room, and read the letter addressed to Janet and herself. She burst into tears. All she said was:—
“Oh, Janet, why couldn’t he have told us?”
And then she fell to hugging the child to her bosom.
Meanwhile Aristide Pujol, clad in his goat-skin cap and coat, valise in hand, was plodding through the rain in search of the elusive phantom, Fortune; gloriously certain that he had assured Jean’s future, yet with such a heartache as he had never had in his life before.