The nurse gave her a stimulant, and in a little while she was able to talk.  So broken and half-coherent, however, was her story that I shall tell it in my own way.  In an hour from the time I entered the Charity Hospital, I had heard a sad and pitiful narrative, and had seen a woman slip into the unconsciousness that is only a step from death.

Briefly, then, the housekeeper’s story was this: 

She was almost forty years old, and had been the sister-mother of a large family of children.  One by one they had died, and been buried beside their parents in a little town in the Middle West.  There was only one sister left, the baby, Lucy.  On her the older girl had lavished all the love of an impulsive and emotional nature.  When Anne, the elder, was thirty-two and Lucy was nineteen, a young man had come to the town.  He was going east, after spending the summer at a celebrated ranch in Wyoming—­one of those places where wealthy men send worthless and dissipated sons, for a season of temperance, fresh air and hunting.  The sisters, of course, knew nothing of this, and the young man’s ardor rather carried them away.  In a word, seven years before, Lucy Haswell had married a young man whose name was given as Aubrey Wallace.

Anne Haswell had married a carpenter in her native town, and was a widow.  For three months everything went fairly well.  Aubrey took his bride to Chicago, where they lived at a hotel.  Perhaps the very unsophistication that had charmed him in Valley Mill jarred on him in the city.  He had been far from a model husband, even for the three months, and when he disappeared Anne was almost thankful.  It was different with the young wife, however.  She drooped and fretted, and on the birth of her baby boy, she had died.  Anne took the child, and named him Lucien.

Anne had had no children of her own, and on Lucien she had lavished all her aborted maternal instinct.  On one thing she was determined, however:  that was that Aubrey Wallace should educate his boy.  It was a part of her devotion to the child that she should be ambitious for him:  he must have every opportunity.  And so she came east.  She drifted around, doing plain sewing and keeping a home somewhere always for the boy.  Finally, however, she realized that her only training had been domestic, and she put the boy in an Episcopalian home, and secured the position of housekeeper to the Armstrongs.  There she found Lucien’s father, this time under his own name.  It was Arnold Armstrong.

I gathered that there was no particular enmity at that time in Anne’s mind.  She told him of the boy, and threatened exposure if he did not provide for him.  Indeed, for a time, he did so.  Then he realized that Lucien was the ruling passion in this lonely woman’s life.  He found out where the child was hidden, and threatened to take him away.  Anne was frantic.  The positions became reversed.  Where Arnold had given money