[34]

The advertisement was answered by a solicitor on behalf of a client. Lady Stableford attempted to insist on a substantiated disclosure of the parentage, and in consequence the negotiations terminated with the refusal of the information and the consequent withdrawal of Lady Stableford’s offer of adoption. Within a week Lady[35] Stableford, returning to the drawing-room after a solitary dinner, found that during her absence from the room, a child, plainly only a few days old, had been left upon the sofa. The flapping of the blind drew her attention to the still open French window, the obvious means by which access to the room had been obtained. At once summoning assistance, Lady Stableford had her park and gardens carefully searched, but without results. For some time the child slept, and Lady Stableford was puzzled what course to adopt. She objected to an unknown child being thrust upon her in that way and without her consent; but the tiny atom of humanity woke with a plaintive cry, and Lady Stableford’s decision was made at once. All the motherliness of her nature welled up, and from that moment she regarded the child as her own and treated it precisely as if it had been.

[35]

Assuming, rightly or wrongly, she never[36] could determine, that this must be the child concerning which she had been in communication, she again wrote to the solicitor. After an interval the letter was returned to her from the Dead Letter Office, marked “gone; address unknown.” An appeal to her own solicitors to help her at once revealed the fact that there was no solicitor of the name upon the roll.

[36]

Carefully Lady Stableford had examined the clothing the child had worn and the shawl in which it had been wrapped. Everything was new and of good quality, and every article was scrupulously clean; but there was no tell-tale coronet upon the clothing to suggest romance, nothing by which identity could be traced. Even the clever brains of her solicitors could suggest no steps she might take to put an end to her doubts. Of birth-marks the child had none.

The identity, as Lady Stableford, of the[37] lady who had advertised the offer of adoption she knew of course had been disclosed only to the supposititious solicitor with whom her own advisers had been in correspondence. There could be little if any doubt the child was the same; but that gave her no further knowledge than the bare fact, if her supposition were correct, that the baby girl for whom she had now accepted the 

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