And where is it?  Ah, that is the wonder of it.  Near you, Philemon, yet not too near.  Mrs. Sutherland has it, and you may have seen its little face through the car window if you were in the station last night when the express passed through to Sutherlandtown.  Ah! but she has her burden to bear too.  An awful, secret burden like my own, only she will have the child—­for, Philemon, she has taken it in lieu of her own, which died last night in my sight; and Mr. Sutherland does not know what she has done, and never will, if you keep the secret as I shall, for the sake of the life our little innocent has thus won.

What do I mean and how was it all?  Philemon, it was God’s work, all but the deception, and that is for the good of all, and to save four broken hearts.  Listen.  Yesterday, only yesterday,—­it seems a month ago,—­Mrs. Sutherland came again to see me with her baby in her arms.  Mr. Sutherland is expected home, as you know, this week, and she was about to start out for Sutherlandtown so as to be in her own house when he came.  The baby was looking well and she was the happiest of women; for the one wish of his heart and hers had been fulfilled and she was soon going to have the bliss of showing the child to his father.  My own babe was on the bed asleep, and I, who am feeling wonderfully strong, was sitting up in a little chair as far away from him as possible, not out of hatred or indifference—­oh, no!—­but because he seemed to rest better when left entirely by himself and not under the hungry look of my eye.  Mrs. Sutherland went over to look at it.  “Oh, he is fair like my baby,” she said, “and almost as sturdy, though mine is a month older.”  And she stooped down and kissed him.  Philemon, he smiled for her, though he never had for me.  I saw it with a greedy longing that almost made me cry out.  Then I turned to her and we talked.

Of what?  I cannot remember now.  At home we had never been intimate friends.  She is from Sutherlandtown and I am from Portchester, and the distance of nine miles is enough to estrange people.  But here, each with a husband absent and a darling infant lying asleep under our eyes, interests we have never thought identical drew us to one another and we chatted with ever-increasing pleasure—­when suddenly Mrs. Sutherland jumped up in a terrible fright.  The infant she had been rocking on her breast was blue; the next minute it shuddered; the next—­it lay in her arms dead!

I hear the shriek yet with which she fell with it still in her arms to the floor.  Fortunately no other ears were open to her cry.  I alone saw her misery.  I alone heard her tale.  The child had been poisoned, Philemon, poisoned by her.  She had mistaken a cup of medicine for a cup of water and had given the child a few drops in a spoon just before setting out from her hotel.  She had not known at the time what she had done, but now she remembered that the fatal cup was just like the other and that the two stood very near together.  Oh, her innocent child, and oh, her husband!