"What do you mean? Why should she be here?" "Mrs. Price, something’s happened!" Suzanne screamed out: "Where is she?" "I don’t know—but—but—I haven’t got her—she’s gone. Mrs. Price—" Suzanne screamed again, putting her hands against the sides of her head, her face, between them, a livid mask. "Gone—gone where? Is she dead?" The girl shook her head, swallowing on a throat dried to a leathern stiffness: "No—no—nothing like that. But—the taxi—it went, disappeared while I was in Justin’s. I was in there buying the candy and when I came out it was gone. I looked everywhere; I couldn’t believe it; I thought she’d come back here—run away from me for a joke." Suzanne, holding the sides of her head, stared like a mad woman, then gave a piercing cry, thin and high, a wild, dolorous sound. Only the solidity of the house prevented it from penetrating to the lower regions where Aggie McGee and her aunt were comfortably lunching. "Listen, Mrs. Price." Esther took her hands and drew them down. "The driver may have made a mistake, taken her somewhere else—he couldn’t—" Suzanne shrieked in sudden frenzy: "She’s been stolen—my baby’s been stolen!" For a second they looked at one another, each pallid face confessing its conviction of the grisly thought. Esther tried to speak, the sentences dropping disconnected: "If it’s that then—then—it’s some one who knows you’re rich—some one—they’ll want money. They’ll give her up for money—Oh, Mrs. Price, I looked—I hunted—" Suzanne’s voice came in a suddenly strangled whisper: "It’s you—It’s your fault! You’ve let them steal my baby. You’ve done it! You’ll be put in jail." With the words issuing from her mouth she staggered and crumpled into a limpness of fiberless flesh and trailing garments. Esther put an arm about her and drew her to the sofa. Here she collapsed amid the cushions, her eyes open, moans coming from her shaking lips. Esther knelt beside her: "Mrs. Price, it’s horrible, but try to keep up, don’t break down this way. No one would dare to do anything to her. If she’s been stolen it’s to the interest of the person who did it to keep her safe. We’ll find her in a day or two. Your mother, her position, her power—she’ll do something, she’ll get her back." Suzanne rolling her head on the cushion, groaned: "Oh, my baby! Oh, Bébita!" Then burst into wild tears and disjointed sentences. She was almost unintelligible, cries to heaven, wails for her child, accusations of the woman at her feet broke from her in a torrent. Once she struck at the girl with a feeble fist. There was no help to be got from her and Esther rose. She spoke more to herself than the anguished creature on the sofa: "We can’t waste time this way. I’ll call up Grasslands and ask what to do."