But ten years later, when Orton emerged from prison, there was almost no one to greet him. The fickle public, that had once been ready to storm the Houses of Parliament for him, had utterly forgotten the man. Nor was there any sign of public interest, when he died in obscurity and poverty fourteen years later. A few of his persistent followers gave him honorable burial as “Sir Roger Tichborne.” The original enigma of the fate of Roger Tichborne, upon which this colossal structure of fraud and legal intricacy was founded, received, to be sure, not the slightest clarification from all the pother and feverish investigating. If ever there had been any good reason to doubt that the young Hampshire aristocrat went helplessly down with the stricken _Bella_ and her fated crew, none remained after the trials and the stupendous publicity they invoked. VI THE KIDNAPPERS OF CENTRAL PARK On the afternoon of Sunday, May 14, 1899, Mrs. Arthur W. Clarke, the young wife of a British publisher’s agent residing at 159 East Sixty-fifth Street, New York, found this advertisement in the _New York Herald_, under the heading, “Employment Wanted:” GIRL (20) as child’s nurse; no experience in city. Nurse, 274 _Herald_, Twenty-third Street. The following Tuesday Mrs. Clarke took into her employment, as attendant for her little daughter, Marion, twenty months old, a pretty young woman, who gave the name of Carrie Jones and said she had come only two weeks before from the little town of Deposit, in upper New York State. The fact explained her lack of references. Mrs. Clarke, far from being suspicious because of the absence of employment papers, was impressed with the new child’s maid. She seemed to be a well-schooled, even-tempered young woman, considerably above her station, devoted to children, and, what was particularly noted, gentle in voice and demeanor--a jewel among servants. Five days later pretty Carrie Jones and Baby Marion Clarke had become the center of one of the celebrated abduction cases and, for a little while, the nucleus of a dark and appalling mystery. To-day, after the lapse of twenty-five years, the effects of this striking affair are still to be read in the precautions hedging the employment of nursemaids in American cities and in the timidity of parents everywhere. It was one of those occasional and impressive crimes which leave their mark on social habits and public behavior long after the details or the incidents themselves have been forgotten. The home of Marion Clarke’s parents in East Sixty-fifth Street is about two squares from the city’s great playground, Central Park, a veritable warren of children and their maids on every sunny day. Here Marion Clarke went almost every afternoon with her new nurse, and here the first scene of the ensuing drama was played.