Crossing the floor with a stumbling step, with the paper which had roused all this indignation still in her hand, she paused before the now seriously alarmed Letty, and demanded in great excitement: 

“Who pinned that paper on my child?  You know; you saw it done.  Was it a man or—­”

“Oh no, ma’am, no, ma’am,” protested the girl.  “No man came near her.  It was a woman—­a nice-looking woman.”

“A woman!”

Mrs. Packard’s tone was incredulous.  But the girl insisted.

“Yes, ma’am; there was no man there at all.  I was on one of the park benches resting, with the baby in my arms, and this woman passed by and saw us.  She smiled at the baby’s ways, and then stopped and took to talking about her,—­how pretty she was and how little afraid of strangers.  I saw no harm in the woman, ma’am, and let her sit down on the same bench with me for a few minutes.  She must have pinned the paper on the baby’s coat then, for it was the only time anybody was near enough to do it.”

Mrs. Packard, with an irrepressible gesture of anger or dismay, turned and walked back to the window.  The movement was a natural one.  Certainly she was excusable for wishing to hide from the girl the full extent of the agitation into which this misadventure had thrown her.

“You may go.”  The words came after a moment of silent suspense.  “Give the baby her supper—­I know that you will never let any one else come so near her again.”

Letty probably did not catch the secret anguish hidden in her tone, but I did, and after the nurse-maid was gone, I waited anxiously for what Mrs. Packard would say.

It came from the window and conveyed nothing.  Would I do so and so?  I forget what her requests were, only that they necessitated my leaving the room.  There seemed no alternative but to obey, yet I felt loath to leave her and was hesitating near the doorway when a new interruption occurred.  Nixon brought in a telegram, and, as Mrs. Packard advanced to take it, she threw on the table the slip of paper which she had been poring over behind the curtains.

As I stepped back at Nixon’s entrance I was near the table and the single glance I gave this paper as it fell showed me that it was covered with the same Hebrew-like characters of which I already possessed more than one example.  The surprise was acute, but the opportunity which came with it was one I could not let slip.  Meeting her eye as the door closed on Nixon, I pointed at the scrawl she had thrown down, and wonderingly asked her if that was what Letty had found pinned to the baby’s coat.

With a surprised start, she paused in her act of opening the telegram and made a motion as if to repossess herself of this, but seeming to think better of it she confined herself to giving me a sharp look.

“Yes,” was her curt assent.

I summoned up all my courage, possibly all my powers of acting.”