"Well, to begin with the kid. I had some trouble at the convent. They're a close-mouthed lot, nuns. But I frightened them. Told them it was a property matter, and unless they answered my questions privately they'd have to answer them in court. Then they came through." "Well?" Spaulding lit his cigar and handed the match to Ruyler, who ground it under his heel. "Just about nineteen years ago a Frenchwoman, giving her name as Madame Dubois, arrived one day with a child a year old and asked the nuns to take care of it, promising a fancy payment. The child had been on a farm with a wet-nurse (French style), but Madame Dubois wanted it to learn from the first to speak proper English and French, and to live in a refined atmosphere generally from the time it was able to take notice. She said she was on the stage and had to travel, so was not able to give the kid the attention it should have, and the doctor had told her that traveling was bad for kids that age, anyhow. Her lawyers would pay the baby's board on the first of every month--" "Who were the lawyers?" "Lawton and Cross." "I thought so. Go on." "The nuns, who, after all, knew their California, thought they smelt a rat, for the woman was extraordinarily handsome, magnificently dressed; the Mother Superior--who is a woman of the world, all right--read the newspapers, and had never seen the name of Dubois--and knew that only stars drew fat salaries. She asked some sharp questions about the father, and the woman replied readily that he was a scientific man, an inventor, and--well, it was natural, was it not? they did not get on very well. He disliked the stage, but she had been on it before she married him, and dullness and want of money for her own needs and her child's had driven her back. He had lived in Los Angeles for a time, but had recently gone East to take a high-salaried position. It was with his consent that she asked the nuns to take the child--possibly for two or three years. When she was a famous actress and could leave the road, she would keep house for her husband in New York, and make a home for the child. "The Mother Superior, by this time, had made up her mind that the father wished the child removed from the mother's influence, and although she took the whole yarn with a bag of salt, the child was the most beautiful she had ever seen, and obviously healthy and amiable. Moreover, the convent was to receive two hundred dollars a month--" "What?" "Exactly. Can you beat it? The Mother Superior made up her mind it was her duty to bring up the little thing in the way it should go. As the woman was leaving she said something about a possible reconciliation with her family, who lived in France; they had not written her since she went on the stage. They were of a respectability!--of the old tradition! But if they came round she might take the child to them, if her husband would consent. She should like it to be brought up in France--