"Well, it looked then as if she couldn't possibly live through the night, and all her mother could think of was to comfort her. She told her that they would go away and forget it all, and Miss Annie clung to her through the whole terrible thing. We none of us got any sleep that night, and I think it was at about three o'clock the next morning that I crept to the door, and the doctor--Doctor Leslie--an old English doctor who was very kind, came to the door and gave me the poor little pitiful baby in a blanket. I almost screamed when I took it, for the poor little soul was alive, working her little mouth! I took her to my room, and indeed I baptized her myself--I named her Mary for my mother, and Leslie for the doctor, but I never thought she'd need a name--then. She was under four pounds, and with a little claw like a monkey's paw, and so thin we didn't dare dress her--we thought she was three months too soon, then, and I just sat watching her, waiting for her to die, and thinking of my own----! "Miss Annie was given up the next day, she'd gone into a brain fever, but my poor little soul was wailing a good healthy wail--I remember I cried bitterly when the doctor told me not to hope for her! But she lived--and on the fourth day Mrs. Melrose sent us away, and we went and stayed in the country for two months after that. "Then I had a letter from the Riviera, the first that'd come. Miss Annie was getting well, her hair was coming out curly, and she hardly remembered anything about what had happened at all. She wasn't nineteen then, poor child! She had cried once, her mother wrote, and had said she thanked God the baby had died and that was all she ever said of it. "I brought the baby home, and for nearly three years she lived with my own, and of course Mrs. Melrose paid me for it. And then one day Louison Courtot came to see me--I'd known her, of course--Mr. Theodore's wife, that had been Miss Annie's maid. She had a letter from Mrs. Melrose, and she took Leslie away, and gave her to her grandmother--just according to plan. Well, I didn't like it--though it gave the child her rights, but it didn't seem honest. I had no call to interfere, and a few months later Mrs. Melrose gave me the double house in Brooklyn, that you'll well remember, Norma--and your own father made out the deed of gift, Mr. Chris----! "And then, perhaps a year later, Louison came to call on me again, and with her was a little girl--four years old, and I looked at her, and looked at Louison, and I said, 'My God--that's a Melrose!' She said, yes, it was Theodore's child." "Norma!" Chris said.