Mrs. Simmons, the matron, could not tell. She had herself been there little more than a year, but a careful searching of the books brought to light the fact that not long after the night when the baby Heloise was found on the steps, it had been taken away by a _Mrs. Stover_, whose daughter Anne was a nurse in the Hospital at the time, and who lived at No. —— Dorset Street. This agreed with the story as told by Mrs. Barrett, and thus far all seemed perfectly plain and easy to the excited woman, whom Colonel Schuyler followed mechanically wheresoever she went. She was taking the lead, not he, but he submitted with a good grace, and went without a word to No —— Dorset Street. It was up two flights of broken, creaking, dirty stairs, and Edith shuddered as she thought how the feet of her own child had probably been up and down this dark stairway, while she, the mother, had lived in luxury and ease. No. —— was a dirty, wretched apartment, reeking with filth, swarming with children, and smelling of onions and boiled cabbage, and that odor peculiar to rooms where the people sleep and cook and eat and live, and seldom wash themselves. The family were Germans, who could not speak a word of English, and stared wonderingly at the beautiful lady, who succeeded in making herself understood. But she might as well have talked to blocks of wood for aught they knew of any tenants there before them. She managed, however, to make out that on the floor above was an old woman, who had occupied the same room for many years, and to her Edith went next, feeling when she stood in the neat, home-like, though humble apartment of Mrs. Myers as if she had stepped into paradise. Mrs. Myers was very old, and had lived there thirty years, and remembered the Stovers, who occupied the floor below. “Tidy, clever people, and not at all like the ’orrid Dutch cattle there now,” she said. “There was old Marm Stover, and her two gals Hanny and Mary. Han worked in some ’orspital, and Mary for some grand lady in the country.” “Was there ever a child living with them,—a little girl with blue eyes and golden hair?” Edith asked. And the woman replied: “There was, mem, and a deal of gossip it made about the girls, though folks mostly laid it to Han, but I never b’lieved a word on’t. It was took from the ’orspital, they said, and had a curis name,—Eloise,—and Mary claimed it as ’ern; and when old Mann Stover died with the cholera, Mary, who was out to service, took the child away, and I’ve never seen her sense, or ’earn tell of her. Was the child anything to you, mem?” “Yes, everything,—it was _mine_,” Edith said, impetuously, while her husband, who did not care to have her quite so outspoken, even to this old woman, said, as he took her hand to lead her away: