The little one would run to meet him, shouting with joy when he appeared, usually with a sweet bunch of flowers or a new toy. They would sit together on a bench a while, and Darling would prattle to him joyously, then with a long-drawn sigh he would leave the spot and reappear several days afterward, always meeting a glad welcome from the child. She did not think it was any harm as he seemed such a perfect gentleman. And she was sure it was not he who had kidnapped the child. It was a dark man, all bushy, black whiskers and wig. The girl was lying; because she had been so busy with her flirtation that she did not know just when the child ran away to meet the blond gentleman beckoning from a distance, and threw herself into his arms. Then it was easy enough to whip into a carriage with her and away. So the frightened nurse stuck to her story of the dark stranger, but the mother’s heart was not deceived. She knew that Darling’s abductor was no one but her father, who, cheated of her sweetness all these years, had thus taken his revenge. For a while the most bitter resentment possessed the mother’s heart. She employed detectives, and spared neither time, money, nor patience in the effort to recover the child. For several years the search went on, ending at last without success. Leon Dalrymple, who had placed his child with his sister, the wife of a poor artisan in an obscure part of the city, and then sailed for Europe himself, had so cleverly covered up his tracks that Mrs. Dalrymple’s daughter was reared in poverty in the same city where her mother was rolling in wealth, yet as effectively separated as if continents had rolled between them. So the years went on, and Mrs. Dalrymple, plunging into the social whirl, tried to drown her grief in vain. Her parents died, and their large fortune fell to her, the only surviving child. Then she took her orphan niece, Cora Ellyson, into her home and heart. But in no sense could Cora fill the lost child’s place. She was passionate, self-willed, imperious, and ungrateful. Her aunt wearied of her often, despairing of any congeniality between them, and secretly anxious that Cora should marry and thus remove to another home. Then came the episode of Jessie Lyndon, the wonderful likeness that startled Mrs. Dalrymple, and the discovery of the family birthmark on the young girl’s breast. Swiftly the links were fastened in the chain that proved the dead girl to be the stolen child, recovered only in death. It was cruel, cruel! The woman’s heart so long on the rack of suspense almost broke beneath the awful strain of hope’s decay. After Jessie’s death and Cora’s accident no one thought it strange that she gave up society, draping herself in the deepest mourning garb. In her restless mood before finding Jessie she had promised to marry a titled Englishman, who, meeting her abroad, had followed her home to plead his suit.