“Where?” gasped Maria.

“Nobody knows where,” said Gladys, severely, although the tears were streaming down her own grimy cheeks.  “She wouldn’t be lost, would she, if folks knew where she was?  Nothin’ ain’t never lost when you know where it is unless you drop it down a well, and you ’ain’t got no well, have you, Maria Edgham?”

“No,” said Maria.  She was conscious of an absurd thankfulness and relief that she had no well.

“And there ain’t no pond round here big enough to drown a baby kitten, except that little mud-puddle up at Fisher’s, and they’ve dragged every inch of that.  I see ’em.”

All this time Edwin Shaw had been teetering on uncertain toes on the borders of the crowd.  He remembered the child with the doll whom he had seen climbing into the New York train in the morning, and he was eager to tell of it, to make himself of importance, but he was afraid.  After all, the child might not have been Evelyn.  There were so many little, yellow-haired things with dolls to be seen about, and then there was the stout woman to be accounted for.  Edwin never doubted that the child had been with the stout woman whom he had seen stumbling over her voluminous skirts up the car steps.  At last he stepped forward and spoke, with a moist blush overspreading his face, toeing in and teetering with embarrassment.

“Say,” he began.

The attention of the whole company was at once riveted upon him.  He wriggled; the blood looked as if it would burst through his face.  Great drops of perspiration stood upon his forehead.  He stammered when he spoke.  He caught a glimpse of Maria’s blue-and-orange trimmings, and looked down, and again the black light of his shoes, which all the dust of the day had not seemed to dim, flashed in his eyes.  He came of a rather illiterate family with aspirations, and when he was nervous he had a habit of relapsing into the dialect in common use in his own home, regardless of his educational attainments.  He did so now.

“I think she has went to New York,” he said.

“Who?” demanded Wollaston, eagerly.  His head was up like a hunting hound; he kept close hold of Maria’s little arm.

“Her.”

“Who?”

“Her little sister-in-law.”  Edwin pointed to Maria.

Gladys Mann went peremptorily up to Edwin Shaw, seized his coat-collar, and shook him.  “For goodness sake! when did she went?” she demanded.  “When did you see her?  If you know anythin’, tell it, an’ not stand thar like a fool!”

“I saw a little girl jest about her size, a-carryin’ of a doll, that clim on the New York train jest as we went out this mornin’,” replied Edwin with a gasp, as if the information were wrung from him by torture.  “And she was with a awful fat woman.  Leastways—­”

“A fat woman!” cried Wollaston Lee.  “Who was the fat woman?”

“I hadn’t never saw her afore.  She was awful fat, and was a steppin’ on her dress.”