It was not Sally Owen’s way to extenuate errors of commission or omission.  Her mental processes were always singularly direct.

“Are you sure she was married; did you find any proof of it?” she asked bluntly.

He was silent for a moment before he met her eyes.

“I have no proof of it.  All I have is Edna’s assurance in a letter.”

Their gaze held while they read each other’s thoughts.  She made no comment; there was nothing to say to this, nor did she show surprise or repugnance at the dark shadow his answer had flung across the meagre picture.

“And Garrison—­who was he?”

“I don’t know even that!  From all I could learn I think it likely he was a student in one of the professional schools; but whether law or medicine, art or music—­I couldn’t determine.  The whole colony of students had scattered to the four winds.  Probably Garrison was not his real name; but that is wholly an assumption.”

“It’s clear enough that whoever the man was, and whether it was straight or not, Edna felt bound to shield him.  That’s just like us fool women.  How did Sylvia come to your hands?”

“There was nothing in that to help.  About four years had passed since I lost track of her and I had traveled all over the East and followed every clue in vain.  I spent two summers in New York walking the streets in the blind hope that I might meet her.  Then, one day,—­this was twelve years ago,—­I had a telegram from the superintendent of a public hospital at Utica that Edna was there very ill.  She died before I got there.  Just how she came to be in that particular place I have no idea.  The hospital authorities knew nothing except that she had gone to them, apparently from the train, seriously ill.  The little girl was with her.  She asked them to send for me, but told them nothing of herself.  She had only hand baggage and it told us nothing as to her home if she had one, or where she was going.  Her clothing, the nurse pointed out, was of a style several years old, but it was clean and neat.  Most surprising of all, she had with her several hundred dollars; but there was nothing whatever by which to reconstruct her life in those blank years.”

“But she wrote to you—­the letters would have given a clue of some kind?”

“The few letters she wrote me were the most fragmentary and all in the first year; they were like her, poor child; her letters were always the merest scraps.  In all of them she said she would come home in due course; that some of her husband’s affairs had to be straightened out first, and that she was perfectly happy.  They were traveling about, she said, and she asked me not to try to write to her.  The first letters came from Canada—­Montreal and Quebec; then one from Albany; then even these messages ceased and I heard no more until the telegram called me to Utica.  She had never mentioned the birth of the child.  I don’t know—­I don’t even know where Sylvia was born, or her exact age.  The nurse at the hospital said Edna called the child Sylvia.”