“I know a girl who was left in the cars somewhere in Ohio almost nineteen years ago;—left with a young boy, and the mother, who took the train at Cincinnati, never came back, and he could not find her. He thinks she was crazy. She had very black hair and eyes, he said, and was dressed in mourning. Perhaps it was Mrs. Grey. Did she come from Cincinnati about that time? It was April, 18—, when the baby I mean was left in the cars.” Mrs. Seymour was surprised out of her usual reserve, and when Magdalen paused for her reply, she said: “My brother’s wife came from Cincinnati in May, not April; but we thought she had been a long time on the road. As to its being 18—, I’m not so sure; but it was nineteen years ago in May, I know, for husband died the next July, and mother the winter after.” “And what of the child? And how did it happen that Mrs. Grey was left to travel alone? Where had she been, and where was Mr. Grey?” Magdalen asked, and Mrs. Seymour replied, “My brother was in Europe,—sent there by unhappy domestic troubles at home. Laura had been in Cincinnati, and came back to Beechwood after the death of her mother and the child, of whose birth we had never heard.” “Never heard of its birth!” Magdalen exclaimed. “Then, perhaps, you do not know certainly of its death. She says she left it in the cars with a boy, and Roger was a boy; the child I told you of was left with him.” “Who was that child, and where is she?” Mrs. Seymour asked, and Magdalen replied, “_I_ am that child, and didn’t you say I reminded you of some one. Didn’t Guy and Alice and your brother say the same; and I, too, can see the resemblance to that crazy woman in _myself_.” Her eyes were full of tears, and as she looked up at Mrs. Seymour her head poised itself upon one side just as Laura’s had done a thousand times in the days gone by. Mrs. Seymour was interested now; that familiar look in Magdalen’s face had always puzzled her, and as she saw her flushed, and excited, and eager, she was struck with the strong resemblance she bore to Laura as she was when she first came to Beechwood, and more to herself than to Magdalen she said: “It is very strange, but still it cannot be,—though that child business was always more or less a mystery to me. Miss Lennox,” and she turned to Magdalen, “would you mind telling me the particulars of your having been left in the car?” Very rapidly Magdalen repeated the story of her desertion as she had heard it from Roger, while Mrs. Seymour listened intently and seemed a good deal moved by the description given of the mother. “Was there nothing about you by which you might be identified? That is, did they keep no article of dress?” she asked, and Magdalen sprang up, exclaiming, “Yes,—the dress I wore; a crimson delaine, dotted with black. I have it with me now.”