but that is wholly an assumption."

"It's clear enough that whoever the man was, and whether it was straight
or not, Edna felt bound to shield him. That's just like us fool women.
How did Sylvia come to your hands?"

"There was nothing in that to help. About four years had passed since I
lost track of her and I had traveled all over the East and followed
every clue in vain. I spent two summers in New York walking the streets
in the blind hope that I might meet her. Then, one day,--this was twelve
years ago,--I had a telegram from the superintendent of a public
hospital at Utica that Edna was there very ill. She died before I got
there. Just how she came to be in that particular place I have no idea.
The hospital authorities knew nothing except that she had gone to them,
apparently from the train, seriously ill. The little girl was with her.
She asked them to send for me, but told them nothing of herself. She had
only hand baggage and it told us nothing as to her home if she had one,
or where she was going. Her clothing, the nurse pointed out, was of a
style several years old, but it was clean and neat. Most surprising of
all, she had with her several hundred dollars; but there was nothing
whatever by which to reconstruct her life in those blank years."

"But she wrote to you--the letters would have given a clue of some
kind?"

"The few letters she wrote me were the most fragmentary and all in the
first year; they were like her, poor child; her letters were always the
merest scraps. In all of them she said she would come home in due
course; that some of her husband's affairs had to be straightened out
first, and that she was perfectly happy. They were traveling about, she
said, and she asked me not to try to write to her. The first letters
came from Canada--Montreal and Quebec; then one from Albany; then even
these messages ceased and I heard no more until the telegram called me
to Utica. She had never mentioned the birth of the child. I don't
know--I don't even know where Sylvia was born, or her exact age. The
nurse at the hospital said Edna called the child Sylvia."

"I overheard Sylvia telling Ware to-night that she was born in New York.
Could it be possible--"

"No; she knows nothing. You must remember that she was only three. When
she began to ask me when her birthday came--well, Sally, I felt that I'd
better give her one; and I told her, too, that she was born in New York
City. You understand--?"

"Of cours