“Ma-ma!”

Like a shot Pomona was on her feet.  With arms outspread and her whole figure dilating until she seemed twice as large as usual, I thought she was about to spring over the balcony into the house below.  I clutched her, and Euphemia and I, both upon our feet, followed her gaze and saw upon the stage a little girl in gay array, and upturned face.  It was the lost Corinne.

Without a word, Pomona made a sudden turn, sprang up the steps behind her, and out upon the lobby, Euphemia and I close behind her.  Around and down the steps we swept, from lobby to lobby, amazing the cloak-keepers and attendants, but stopping for nothing; down the grand staircase like an avalanche, almost into the arms of the astonished military sentinels, who, startled from their soldier-like propriety, sprang, muskets in hand, toward us.  It was only then that I was able to speak to Pomona, and breathlessly ask her where she was going.

“To the stage-door!” she cried, making a motion to hurl to the ground the soldier before her.  But there was no need to go to any stage-door.  In a moment there rushed along the corridor a lady, dressed apparently in all the colors of the rainbow, and bearing in her arms a child.  There was a quick swoop, and in another moment Pomona had the child.  But clinging to its garments, the lady cried, in excellent English, but with some foreign tinge:—­

“Where is my child you stole?”

“Stole your grandmother!” briefly ejaculated Pomona.  And then, in grand forgetfulness of everything but her great joy, she folded her arms around her child, and standing like a statue of motherly content, she seemed, in our eyes, to rise to the regions of the caryatides and the ceiling frescos.  Not another word she spoke, and amid the confusion of questions and exclamations, and the wild demands of the lady, Euphemia and I contrived to make her understand the true state of the case, and that her child was probably at our lodgings.  Then there were great exclamations and quick commands; and, directly, four of us were in a carriage whirling to our hotel.  All the way, Pomona sat silent with her child clasped tightly, while Euphemia and I kept up an earnest but unsatisfactory conversation with the lady; for, as to this strange affair, we could tell each other but little.  We learned from the lady, who was an assistant soprano at the Grand Opera, how Corinne came to her in Paris, and how she had always kept her with her, even dressing her up, and taking her on the stage in that great act where as many men, women, and children as possible were brought upon the scene.  When she heard the cry of Corinne, she knew the child had seen its mother, and then, whether the opera went on or not, it mattered not to her.

When the carriage stopped, the three women sprang out at once, and how they all got through the door, I cannot tell.  There was such a tremendous ring at the gate of the court that the old concierge, who opened it by pulling a wire in his little den somewhere in the rear, must have been dreadfully startled in his sleep.  We rushed through the court and up the stairs past our apartments to Pomona’s room; and there in the open doorway stood Jonas, his coat off, his sandy hair in wild confusion, his face radiant, and in his hands Little Kensington in her nightgown.