"It was changed for me," she said. "This paper helped to change it for me; and you, too, helped without your knowledge; and one other, and most of all my baby here, helped to change it for me. Judge Priest, since my baby came to me my whole view of life seems somehow to have been altered. I've been lying here to-day with her beside me, thinking things out. Suppose I should be taken from her, and suppose her father should be taken, too, and she should be left, as I was, to the mercy of the world and the charity of strangers. Suppose she should grow up, as I did--although until I read that paper I didn't know it--beholden to the goodness and the devotion and the love of one who was not her real mother. Wouldn't she owe to that other woman more than she could have owed to me, her own mother, had I been spared to rear her? I think so--no, I know it is so. Every instinct of motherhood in me tells me it is so." "Lady," he answered, "to a mere man woman always will be an everlastin' puzzle and a riddle; but even a man kin appreciate, in a poor, faint way, the depths of mother love. It's ez though he looked through a break in the clouds and ketched a vision of the glories of heaven. But you ain't told me yit how you come to be in possession of this here sheet of note paper." "Oh, that's right! I had forgotten," she answered. "Try to think now, judge--when my mother refused to let you go farther with your plan that night at her house, what did you do with the paper?" "I shoved it out of sight quick ez ever I could. I recall that much anyway." "Did you by any chance put it in your pocket?" "Well, by Nathan Bedford Forrest!" he exclaimed. "I believe that's purzackly the very identical thing I did do. And bein' a careless old fool, I left it there instid of tearin' it up or burnin' it, and then I went on home and plum' furgot it wuz still there--not that I now regret havin' done so, seein' whut to-night's outcome is." "And did your servant, after you were gone, send the suit you had worn that night downtown to be cleaned or repaired? Or do you know about that?" "I suspicion that he done that very thing," he said, a light beginning to break in upon him. "Jeff is purty particular about keepin' my clothes in fust-rate order. He aims fur them to be in good condition when he decides it's time to confiscate 'em away frum me and start in wearin' 'em himself. Yessum, my Jeff's mighty funny that way. And now, come to think of it, I do seem to reckerlect that I spilt a lot of ink on 'em that same night."