"If I told you the truth now you would not believe it. But what I am telling you is the truth, and I will swear to it. Louise Fanning died two days after her baby was born. I lay there in their house at that time, and they told me that my baby had died. There was no one then acting as the head of the house. The servants were all distracted. One day some one came and put this live baby, the daughter of Louise Fanning, in my arms. Oh! you don't know, but I longed so for my baby! My arms fairly ached. So then I took this one and loved it. Sir, I was a mother to her, a sort of mother--as good, I suppose, as I could have been at all--for a long time." Eddring sat looking at her, his fingers pressed closely to his lips. "What you tell me, Madam, is very, very strange," said he. "It might perhaps have been true." "Believe it or not," said Alice Ellison, "it is the truth, as I have told you. There was no head to that household. There was no place to leave that little child. I took it for my own. I did not at that time intend any wrong. I don't know whether Decherd did at that time or not. It was there at the Fannings' that we met the girl Delphine, who had come in there from somewhere in the Indian Nations. She was then in her early teens, and was good-looking. I don't want to talk much about it, but it was then, I think, that Henry Decherd got--got interested in her. What he told her I don't know. He found out in some way that her name was Loise. In some way then and later he got to looking up the name of Loise in St. Louis, where the girl said her people originally lived. He assumed the management of her case, along with some other lawyers to whom he carried it." "But did he think she was the heiress of the Loisson estates?" "You, as a lawyer, can tell that better than I can. In some ways he had a good mind. He never told me much after that, except that he said if this case was ever decided he could not lose, no matter which way it went. We waited, years and years, for the case to get through the Supreme Court." "How did you live in the meantime, and where did you go?" "Don't ask me that. We lived the best way we could. Decherd got money now and again, and for reasons of his own he sent some money, once in a while, to keep me and the child, although he practically abandoned me, and, as I think, associated the more with this girl Delphine. He claimed to me all the time that it was necessary for him to live in this part of the country, in order to handle the lawsuit for her. She moved up here from New Orleans, I suppose to some town not far from Colonel Blount's plantation. I think he got us in there at Blount's place because he thought it would be less expense to him. In the meantime, I had educated the girl the best I could. Sir, I loved her in a way, until I thought other men were noticing her; and then I could not stand it."