range and seemingly inexplicable affair came to light, I began
to feel the stirring of the detective instinct within me (did I say that
I was connected with a private detective agency of some note in the
metropolis?) and a desire, quite apart from any mere humane interest in
the event itself, to locate the intelligence back of such a desperate
crime: an intelligence so keen that, up to the present moment, if we may
trust the published accounts of the affair, not a clue had been
unearthed by which its author could be traced, or the means employed for
carrying off this petted object of a thousand cares.

To be sure, there was a theory which eliminated all crime from the
occurrence as well as the intervention of any one in the child's fate:
she might have strayed down to the river and been drowned. But the
probabilities were so opposed to this supposition, that the police had
refused to embrace it, although the mother had accepted it from the
first, and up to the present moment, or so it was stated, had refused to
consider any other. As she had some basis for this conclusion--I am
still quoting the papers, you understand--I was not disposed to ignore
it in the study I proceeded to make of the situation. The details, as I
ran them over in the hurried trip I now made up the river to ----, were
as follows:

On the afternoon of Wednesday, August sixteenth, 190--, the guests
assembled in Mrs. Ocumpaugh's white and gold music-room were suddenly
thrown into confusion by the appearance among them of a young girl in a
state of great perturbation, who, running up to the startled hostess,
announced that Gwendolen, the petted darling of the house, was missing
from the bungalow where she had been lying asleep, and could not be
found, though a dozen men had been out on search.

The wretched mother, who, as it afterward transpired, had not only given
the orders by which the child had been thus removed from the excitement
up at the house, but had actually been herself but a few moments before
to see that the little one was well cared for and happy, seemed struck
as by a mortal blow at these words and, uttering a heart-rending scream,
ran out on the lawn. A crowd of guests rushed after her, and as they
followed her flying figure across the lawn to the small copse in which
lay hidden this favored retreat, they could hear, borne back on the
wind, the wild protests of the young nurse, that she had left the child
for a minute only and then t