“I am not the most patient of men, Margaret Dornham,” he said; “and you are trying me terribly.  In the name of Heaven, I ask you, what have you done with my child?”

“I have not injured her,” she sobbed.

“Is she living or dead?” asked the earl, with terrible calmness.

“She is living,” replied the weeping woman.

Lord Mountdean raised his face reverently to the summer sky.

“Thank Heaven!” he said, devoutly; and then added, turning to the woman—­“Living and well?”

“No, not well; but she will be in time.  Oh, sir, forgive me!  I did wrong, perhaps, but I thought I was acting for the best.”

“It was a strange ‘best,’” he said, “to place a child beyond its parent’s reach.”

“Oh, sir,” cried Margaret Dornham, “I never thought of that!  She came to me in my dead child’s place—­it was to me as though my own child had come back again.  You could not tell how I loved her.  Her little head lay on my breast, her little fingers caressed me, her little voice murmured sweet words to me.  She was my own child—­I loved her so, sir!” and the poor woman’s voice was broken with sobs.  “All the world was hard and cruel and cold to me—­the child never was; all the world disappointed me—­the child never did.  My heart soul clung to her.  And then, sir, when she was able to run about, a pretty, graceful, loving child, the very joy of my heart and sunshine of my life, the doctor died, and I was left alone with her.”

She paused for some few minutes, her whole frame shaken with sobs.  The earl, bending down, spoke kindly to her.

“I am quite sure,” he said, “that if you erred it has been through love for my child.  Tell me all—­have no fear.”

“I was in the house, sir,” she continued, “when the poor doctor was carried home dead—­in his sitting-room with my—­with little Madaline—­and when I saw the confusion that followed upon his death, I thought of the papers in the oaken box; and, without saying a word to any one, I took it and hid it under my shawl.”

“But, tell me,” said the earl, kindly, “why did you do that?”

“I can hardly remember now,” she replied—­“it is so long since.  I think my chief motive was dread lest my darling should be taken from me.  I thought that, if strangers opened the box and found out who she was, they would take her away from me, and I should never see her again.  I knew that the box held all the papers relating to her, so I took it deliberately.”

“Then, of course,” said the earl, “you know her history?”

“No,” she replied, quickly; “I have never opened the box.”

“Never opened it!” he exclaimed, wonderingly.

“No, sir—­I have never even touched it; it is wrapped in my old shawl just as I brought it away.”

“But why have you never opened it?” he asked, still wondering.

“Because, sir, I did not wish to know who the little child really was, lest, in discovering that, I should discover something also which would compel me to give her up.”