'Oh, you did it, did you? You confess that! And what have you done with him?' 'I tell you he is no Morton at all--just the nurse-woman's child, taken to spite you. I found it all out at--what's its name?--Botzen; only ma would not be convinced.' 'I should suppose not! To think that my uncle and aunt would do such a thing--why, I don't know whether it is not worse than stealing the child!' 'Herbert! Herbert! do you want to bring your sister to jail, talking in that way?' 'It is no more than you deserve. I _would_ bring you there if it is the only way to get back the child! I do not know what is bad enough for you. My poor uncle and aunt! To have brought such misery on them!' He clenched his hands as he spoke. 'Everybody said she didn't mind--didn't ask questions, didn't cry, didn't go on a bit like his real mother.' 'She could not, or it might have been the death of my uncle. Bertha wrote it all to me; but you--you would never understand. Ida, I can't believe that you, my sister, could have done such an awfully wicked thing!' 'I wouldn't, only I was sure he was not--' 'No more of that stuff!' said Herbert. 'You don't know what they are.' 'I do. So strict--not a bit like a mother.' 'If our mother had been like them, you might not have been such a senseless monster,' said Herbert, pausing for a word. 'Come, now; tell me what you have done with him, or I shall have to set on the police.' 'Oh, Herbert, how can you be so cruel?' 'It is not I that am cruel! Come, speak out! Did you bribe her with your teapot? Ah! I see: what has she done with him?' He gripped her arm almost as he used to torture her when they were children, and insisted again that either she must tell him the whole truth or he should set the police on the track. 'You wouldn't,' she said, awed. 'Think of the exposure and of mother!' 'I can think of nothing but saving Mite! I say--my mother knows nothing of this?' 'Oh no, no!' Herbert breathed more freely, but he was firm, and seemed suddenly to have grown out of boyishness into manly determination, and gradually he extracted the whole story from her. He would not listen to the delusion in which she had worked herself into believing, founded upon the negations for which she had sedulously avoided seeking positive refutation, and which had been bolstered up by her imagination and wishes, working on the unsubstantial precedents of novels. She had brought herself absolutely to believe in the imposture, and at a moment when her uncle's condition seemed absolutely to place within her grasp the coronet for Herbert, with all possibilities for herself.