you never took no particular notice. Tell you what you might
remember it by. It's got an oleander-tree in a box near the door in
the front yard. The man and woman who live there come from some furrin
place and are most as black as colored people. They've been there a
long time, five or six years, I guess, and have got a vegetable-garden
and a corn-patch. I guess you never took no notice. Well, Miss
Goodrich, drivin' past on her way home from visitin' her relative,
stopped there jest by chance--I forgit now whether a rain-storm come
up or she wanted a drink o' water--but there in that 'most black
woman's house she see the fairest boy-baby she says she ever set eyes
on. Then she began askin' questions, and the woman owned 'twarn't
hers, and it come out, not all at once, but gradually, for Miss
Goodrich she was interested, that when that baby was nothin' but a few
weeks old, a well-dressed lady, she might have been fifty or so,
brought him to her in the carry-all from the depot, and said would she
keep him and bring him up as her own, and here was a sum o' money and
there to be the end o' the whole thing. You can't rightly tell how
much she give her, the woman don't let on, and as she don't talk much
English, it's sort o' hard gettin' things out o' her. But I shouldn't
wonder if it had been somethin' like a thousand dollars. I guess it
was as much as that, for she was a fashionable-lookin' lady. And from
that day to this not a word nor a sign further, and the woman ain't no
more idea than you or me who the lady was or whose child she's got.
But she ain't any children of her own, nor ever has had, and he's a
purty little fellow, and she don't seem to mind the care of him any
more 'n if he was her own. The lady never left any name to call him
by,--she jest wanted to wash her hands of him, that's clear
enough,--and the woman calls him Larry, 'cause she thinks that's one
of our names. But it's queer, ain't it, the whole thing? If it wasn't
so far I'd drive over myself, jest out o' curiosity. I sh'ld think
you'd like to, Miss Ceely. Things like that, that sounds as if they
come out of a story-book, is in your line, I sh'ld jedge."

Celia remembered afterwards, marvelling, how small hand she had had in
the incidents which brought her to the place where a treacherous fate
lay in wait for her. It seemed to her that her will had been at every
step counter to the direction she finally must take.

It was a friend on a visit to her,