Mary succeeded in restraining her impatience for tidings of her husband's success within bounds, for several hours; but after the one o'clock dinner it grew stronger than her will, and would not be controlled. "By which way are they most likely to reach the village, Judith? I feel myself fretting into a fever as I sit. I must be up and doing, or I shall lose my senses. Betsey, my dear, will you not come out with me? We will walk in the direction we are most likely to meet them. It will bring me the news a minute or two sooner, and it soothes me to feel I am doing. You will tell me about your own plans, too, dear. It is good for me to listen to other people's concerns, if only to distract me from my own." Betsey was nothing loth. She was good-natured, at least, if not endowed with all the other virtues. They walked through the village, and up the turnpike road coming from the east. Mary, notwithstanding her weakness, was so urged forward by impatience that Betsey, scarce able to keep up with her, was soon out of breath, and quite unable to make the interesting confidences she had intended. "Is not that a carriage coming this way? I see two men on the driving-box, and one of them is George. Oh! the time is come. Lend me your arm, Betsey, dear, to steady me. I am getting faint. If this is another disappointment, how shall I bear it?" The carriage drew near. One look in George's face told all. Hopelessness had settled on it; he looked utterly cast down. He alighted as his wife drew near, and the afflicted ones embraced in silent wretchedness, as they had done many a time before. The story of the expedition did not take long to tell. The squaw was able to point out the way she had taken all across the Reservation, with circumstantial details, which made it impossible to doubt the accuracy of her recollection, and argued a hopeful termination to their search. On gaining the public road they entered the carriage, and still the squaw went on recognizing salient objects on either hand, and finally, at a forking of the road, where there stood a house, she cried out, that there was the place. It corresponded perfectly to her previous descriptions. They alighted, and the sergeant knocked at the door. A woman opened it, and when asked by the officer how long she had lived there, answered, after many repetitions of the question and much explanation, and disavowing that she understood English, twenty years. "Then you will remember," the policeman said, "if one summer night, many years ago, you found an infant lying at your door?" She answered that babies were never left there. She was a respectable woman, who had brought up a family of her own, and that the proper place to leave outcast children was a convent, or the priest's house.