Millbank;

Having locked the door, Magdalen brought a chair to Mrs. Seymour, and said:

“You are out of breath; sit there, but let me stand. I should suffocate if I were sitting down. I feel as if a hundred pairs of lungs were rising in my throat.”

She was paler now than when Mrs. Seymour first met her in the parlor, and her eyes flashed and sparkled and glowed as only one pair of eyes had ever done before in Mrs. Seymour’s presence, and for an instant a doubt of the young girl’s sanity crossed that lady’s mind, and she glanced uneasily at the door, as if contemplating an escape. But Magdalen was standing before her, and Magdalen’s eyes held her fast. She dared not go now if she could, and she asked nervously what Miss Lennox wanted of her.

“I want you to tell me what it is about the child of whom Mrs. Grey talks so much. Was there a child born after Alice, say nineteen or twenty years ago, and did it die, or was it lost; and if so, when, and how; and was Mrs. Grey here when it was born, or was she somewhere else, in Cincinnati or vicinity? Tell me that. Tell me all about it.”

Mrs. Seymour was very proud and haughty, and very reticent with regard to their family matters, especially the matters pertaining to her brother’s marriage and his wife’s insanity. She never talked of them to any one except Guy, from whom she had no secrets; and her most intimate friends, the Dagons and Draggons of New York society, knew nothing except what rumor told them of the demented woman who made Beechwood a prison rather than a paradise. How, then, was she startled, and shocked, and astonished, when this young girl,—this hired companion for her niece,—demanded of her a full recital of what she had never told her most familiar friends. Not asked for it, but demanded it as a right, and enforced the demand with burning eyes and the half-menacing attitude of one determined to have her way. Ordinarily Mrs. Seymour would have put this girl down, as she termed it, and given her a lesson in good breeding and manners, but there was something about her now which precluded all that, and after a moment she said:

“Your conduct is very strange, Miss Lennox. Very strange indeed, and what I did not expect from you. I suppose I may be permitted to ask your right to a story which few have ever heard?”

“Certainly,” Magdalen replied; “question my right as much as you like, only tell me what I want to know. Was there a child, and did it die?”

“There was a child, and it did die,” Mrs. Seymour said, and Magdalen, nothing daunted, continued: “How do you know it died? Did you see it dead? She says she left it in the cars; she told me so to-day. Oh, Mrs. Seymour, tell me, please what you know about that child before I, too, go mad!”

Magdalen was kneeling now before Mrs. Seymour, on whose lap her hands were clasped, and her beautiful face was all aglow with her excitement as she continued:

“I know a girl who was left in the cars somewhere in Ohio almost nineteen years ago;—left with a young boy, and the mother, who took the train at Cincinnati, never came back, and he could not find her. He thinks she was crazy. She had very black hair and eyes, he said, and was dressed in mourning. Perhaps it was Mrs. Grey. Did she come from Cincinnati about that time? It was April, 18—, when the baby I mean was left in the cars.”

Mrs. Seymour was surprised out of her usual reserve, and when Magdalen paused for her reply, she said:

“My brother’s wife came from Cincinnati in May, not April; but we thought she had been a long time on the road. As to its being 18—, I’m not so sure; but it was nineteen years ago in May, I know, for husband died the next July, and mother the winter after.”

“And what of the child? And how did it happen that Mrs. Grey was left to travel alone? Where had she been, and where was Mr. Grey?” Magdalen asked, and Mrs. Seymour replied, “My brother was in Europe,—sent there by unhappy domestic troubles at home. Laura had been in Cincinnati, and came back to Beechwood after the death of her mother and the child, of whose birth we had never heard.”

“Never heard of its birth!” Magdalen exclaimed. “Then, perhaps, you do not know certainly of its death. She says she left it in the cars with a boy, and Roger was a boy; the child I told you of was left with him.”

“Who was that child, and where is she?” Mrs. Seymour asked, and Magdalen replied, “I am that child, and didn’t you say I reminded you of some one. Didn’t Guy and Alice and your brother say the same; and I, too, can see the resemblance to that crazy woman in myself.”

Her eyes were full of tears, and as she looked up at Mrs. Seymour her head poised itself upon one side just as Laura’s had done a thousand times in the days gone by. Mrs. Seymour was interested now; that familiar look in Magdalen’s face had always puzzled her, and as she saw her flushed, and excited, and eager, she was struck with the strong resemblance she bore to Laura as she was when she first came to Beechwood, and more to herself than to Magdalen she said:

“It is very strange, but still it cannot be,—though that child business was always more or less a mystery to me. Miss Lennox,” and she turned to Magdalen, “would you mind telling me the particulars of your having been left in the car?”

Very rapidly Magdalen repeated the story of her desertion as she had heard it from Roger, while Mrs. Seymour listened intently and seemed a good deal moved by the description given of the mother.

“Was there nothing about you by which you might be identified? That is, did they keep no article of dress?” she asked, and Magdalen sprang up, exclaiming, “Yes,—the dress I wore; a crimson delaine, dotted with black. I have it with me now.”

“A crimson delaine, dotted with black,” Mrs. Seymour repeated, while her hands began to tremble nervously and her voice to grow a little unsteady. “There was such a dress in Laura’s satchel; baby’s dress, she told us, and Alice has it in her drawer.”

“Get it, get it, and we will compare the two,” Magdalen cried, and seizing Mrs. Seymour’s hand she dragged rather than led her to the door of Alice’s room; then, going hastily to her trunk, she took from it the dress which she had worn to Millbank. “Here it is,” she cried, turning to Mrs. Seymour, who came in with another dress, at sight of which Magdalen uttered a wild exultant cry, while every particle of color faded from Mrs. Seymour’s face, and her eyes wore a frightened kind of look. The dresses were alike! The same material, the same size, the same style, except that Mrs. Seymour’s was low in the neck, while Magdalen’s was high, and what was still more confirmatory that they had belonged to the same person, the buttons were alike, and Magdalen pointed out to the astonished woman the same peculiarity about the button holes and a portion of the work upon the dresses. The person who made them must have been left-handed, as was indicated by the hems where left-handed stitches would show so plainly.

“I am astonished, I am confounded, I am bewildered, I feel like one in a dream,” Mrs. Seymour repeated to herself.

Then she dropped panting into a chair, and wiping the perspiration from her face, continued:

“The coincidence is most remarkable; the dresses are alike; and still it is no proof. Was there nothing else?”

“Yes. Do you recognize this? Did you ever see it before?” Magdalen said, holding up the little locket which had been fastened about her neck when she came to Millbank.

Mrs. Seymour took it in her hands and examined it closely, then passed it back with the remark, “I never saw it before, to my knowledge.”

“But the initials, ‘L. G.’—did you notice those?” Magdalen continued, and then Mrs. Seymour took the locket again, and glancing at the lettering whispered rather than said aloud:

“‘L. G.’ That stands for Laura Grey. It may be. I wish Arthur was here, for I don’t know what to think or do.”

“You can at least tell me about the child,” Magdalen persisted, and Mrs. Seymour, who by this time was considerably shaken out of her usual reticence and reserve, replied, “Yes, I can do that, trusting to your honor as a lady never to divulge what I may tell you of our family affairs. My brother always had a penchant for pretty faces, and while he was young had several affairs du cœur which came to nothing. When he was forty, or thereabouts, he went to Cincinnati, where he stayed a long time, and at last startled us with the announcement of his marriage with Laura Clayton, a young girl of seventeen, whose beauty, he said, surpassed anything he had ever seen. She was not of high blood, as we held blood, he wrote, but she was wholly respectable, and pure, and sweet, and tolerably well educated, and he wanted us to lay aside our prejudices and receive her as his wife should be received. I was in favor of doing so, though perhaps this feeling was owing in part to my husband’s sensible reasoning and partly to the fact that I did not live here then and would not be obliged to come in daily contact with her. My home was in New York, and so I only heard from time to time of the doings at Beechwood. It transpired afterward that Laura’s mother was a widow, who lived much by herself, without relatives and only a few acquaintances. She had come from New Orleans the year before, and bought a house and quite a large lot of land in the suburbs of Cincinnati. There was Spanish blood in her veins, and it shows itself in Laura. The mother did some plain sewing for Arthur, who in that way saw the daughter and finally married her against her mother’s wishes. I think Mrs. Clayton was a sensible woman, or perhaps she feared that Arthur only sought her daughter’s ruin; for she tried to keep them apart, and so made the matter worse and drove them into a clandestine marriage. Mother and sister Clarissa were here then. Clarissa was never married, and from her I learned the most I know about the trouble. She deeply regretted afterward the course they pursued toward Laura, whom they did not understand, and whose life they made so wretched with their coldness and pride. She was naturally high-spirited, but she bore patiently for a long time whatever they laid upon her and tried, I believe, to please them in all things. Clarissa herself told me that the girl never really turned upon them, except as her eyes would sometimes blaze with anger, until Alice was born, and mother wanted her put out to a wet nurse, who lived so far away that for Laura to see her baby every day was impossible. Then she rebelled openly, and there was a terrible scene, but mother carried her point, as she usually did when she had Arthur where she could talk to him. Laura fought like a tigress when the last moment came, and mother took the baby from her by force, and then locked her in her room for fear she would go down to the river and drown herself, as she threatened to do. Arthur was in New York, or I think he would have interfered when he saw how it affected Laura. I was sorry for the poor girl when I heard of it from Clarissa. I had lost a dear little baby and could sympathize with Laura. I think it makes a woman harder and less considerate not to have a husband or children of her own, and Clarissa had neither.”

Mrs. Seymour forgot that her mother had both husband and children, and that therefore the thing which would excuse Clarissa could not be applied to her. But Magdalen did not forget it, and her fists were involuntarily clinched as if to smite the hard old woman who had torn Laura’s baby from her.

“Does Alice know this?” she asked, and Mrs. Seymour replied, “She does not, of course. There could be no reason for harrowing up her feelings with a recital of the past, and I hardly know why I am telling you the story so fully as I am.”

“Never mind, go on;” Magdalen exclaimed eagerly, and Mrs. Seymour continued:

“After the baby went away a kind of melancholy mood came over Laura and she would sit for hours and even days without speaking to any one; then she would have fits of crying, and again was irritable and quarrelsome, so that it was a trial to live with her. After two or three months she ceased to speak of her child, and when Arthur offered to take her to see it flew into so fierce a passion that he took the next train to New York and left her with mother.

“It was a habit of his to go away from anything disagreeable, and most of his time was spent from home. He was always very fickle. To possess a thing was equivalent to his tiring of it, and even before Alice’s birth he was weary of his young wife; and so matters went on from bad to worse till Alice was nearly a year old, and Arthur began to talk of going abroad, while Laura proposed a separation, or that she should be allowed to go to Cincinnati while her husband was away. They would all be happier, she said; and his mother and Clarissa favored the plan. Arthur consented, and went with her himself to Cincinnati, and settled a yearly allowance upon her, and at her mother’s request bought three or four vacant lots which adjoined hers and were for sale, and which she wanted to hold so as to prevent shanties from being built upon them.”

“And didn’t Mrs. Grey see her baby before she went?” Magdalen asked, and Mrs. Seymour replied:

“Yes, once. It was brought to the house, but she took little notice of it, and said it belonged to the Greys, not to her. We think now she was crazy then, though they did not suspect it at the time. She expressed no regret whatever when Arthur left her, but on the contrary seemed relieved to have him go. He sailed for Europe the next week, and was gone a year and a half, or more. Laura wrote to him quite regularly at first, but never held any communication with Beechwood. After a while there was a break in her letters, and when at last she wrote she told him something of which he had no suspicion at the time of his leaving home. He ought to have come back to her then, but he did not, though he sent her money and advised her to return to Beechwood. This she would not do. She preferred to stay with her mother, she said; and he heard no more from her for three or four months, when she wrote a few hurried lines, telling him her baby Madeline died when she was four weeks old, and adding that she presumed he would not care, as it would save him the trouble of taking the child from her as he had taken Alice. That roused him a little to a sense of his duty, and he wrote kindly to her and told her he was sorry, and advised her again to return to Beechwood, where he said he would join her. To this she did not reply for a long time, and when at last she wrote she said that her mother was dead, and that after visiting a friend she was going back to Beechwood. The next he heard from her she was here at Beechwood, where she had arrived wholly unexpected by mother and Clarissa, who did not know that she was coming, and who judged that she must have been weeks on the road. Her baggage was lost, and she had nothing with her but a little satchel, in which was a child’s dress and a few other articles. She was dressed in black, and told them her mother was dead, but said nothing of the child of whose birth they had never heard, she having insisted that Arthur should not tell them of it. She was very quiet for a few days, never speaking unless spoken to, and then she did not always answer. Occasionally they heard her muttering to herself, ‘One is dead, and one is safe. They will never find it,—never,’ but what she meant, they could not guess.

“Alice was spending a few days with her foster-mother up the river, and did not return till Laura had been home a week. In all that time she had never mentioned her child, and when at last she came, and Clarissa said to her, ‘Your baby is here, Laura. Would you like to see her?’ she sprang to her feet and her eyes glared like a maniac’s.

“‘Baby was hid,’ she said. ‘Baby was gone where they could not find it.’

“Then her mood changed, and she raved for the baby till Alice was brought to her; but that only made her worse, and she became perfectly furious, telling them this was not the baby whom she had lost, and whom she insisted upon their finding.

“Clarissa wrote at once to Arthur, who hastened home, finding his mother and sister at their wit’s end, and his wife raving mad, and calling continually for the baby she had lost, or hid. That was her constant theme—‘lost, or hid, or left somewhere.’ Arthur did his best to soothe her, telling her the baby was dead, and asking if she did not remember writing to him about it. But it did no good. Her reply was always the same: ‘One is dead, and one is not.’

“For hours she would sit repeating these words in a kind of moaning, half sobbing way, ‘one is dead, and one is not;’ and never from that time has she known a rational moment. Hunting out Alice’s cradle, she took it to her room, and rocked it day and night, saying her lost baby was in it, and raving fearfully if the family made a noise in the room.

“This annoyed Arthur terribly. He likes quiet, and ease, and luxury, and, as he could not have these in his own house, he sought them elsewhere, and has travelled almost over the world. Twice Laura has been in a private asylum. She was there all the time we were abroad; but after our return Alice begged so hard for her to be allowed to come to Beechwood, that Arthur brought her back, and will never move her again.

“Mother died the winter after Laura’s return, and Clarissa the year following. As my husband was dead, and I alone in the world, I came here to care for my brother and Alice. Poor girl! Her life has been a sad one, though she knows nothing, or comparatively nothing, of the early domestic trouble between her parents, and how her mother was received at Beechwood.”

Mrs. Seymour paused here, and Magdalen, who had listened eagerly, asked, “If that child which died when it was four weeks old had lived, how old would it have been when Mr. Grey came home?”

Mrs. Seymour could hardly tell, for the reason that in her letter to her husband Laura did not give the date of its birth but as nearly as they could judge it must have been nine or ten months old, possibly more.

“Yes,” Magdalen said; “and the dress in the satchel,—did it never occur to you that it could not have been made for a four weeks’ old baby. It was meant for a larger child. And did you never think there might be a meaning in the words, ‘One is dead, and one is not,’ Mrs. Seymour?” and Magdalen grew more earnest and vehement. “There must have been two children instead of one,—twins, one of whom died and the other she left in the cars. I know it, I believe it. I shall prove it yet. She has always talked to me of two, and one she said was Madeline and one was Magdalen, and Mr. Irving told me that the woman in the cars called me something which sounded like Magdalen. Don’t you see it? Can’t you understand how it all might be?”

Mrs. Seymour was confounded and bewildered, and answered faintly, “Oh, I don’t know; I wish Arthur was here.”

“I am going to him,” Magdalen exclaimed, starting to her feet,—“going at once, and have him help me solve this mystery. Alice must not know till I come back, and not then, if I fail. I shall start for Cincinnati to-morrow. A woman can oftentimes find out things which a man cannot. Do you think your nephew will go with me?”

She talked so fast, and with so much assurance, that Mrs. Seymour was insensibly won to think as she did and assent to whatever she suggested; and the result was that in less than half an hour’s time Guy, who had been invited up to Magdalen’s room, had heard the whole of the strange story. He believed it, and indorsed Magdalen at once, and hurrahed for his new cousin, and winding his arm around her waist waltzed with her across the room, upsetting his Aunt Pen’s work-basket, and when she remonstrated he caught her in his other arm and took her with him in his mad dance. Exhausted, panting, and half indignant at her scapegrace nephew, Auntie Pen released herself from his grasp, and after a time Magdalen succeeded in stopping him, but he kept fast hold of her hands, while she explained what she wanted of him, and asked if he would go with her.

“Go with you? Yes, the world over, ma belle cousin,” he said, and greatly to the horror of prim Mrs. Penelope, he sealed his promise to serve her with a kiss upon her brow.

Mrs. Seymour was shocked, and half doubted the propriety of sending Magdalen off alone with Guy; but Magdalen knew the kiss was given to Alice as her possible sister rather than to herself, and so did not resent it.

They were to start the next day, but it was not thought best to let Alice know of the journey until morning. Then they told her that a matter of importance, which had recently come to Magdalen’s knowledge, made it necessary for her to go to Cincinnati, and that Guy was going with her. Alice knew they were keeping something from her, but would not question them, and without a suspicion of the truth she bade Magdalen and Guy good-by, and saw them start on their journey to Cincinnati.