"Oh, yes; so it was. You're the same Whitelaw who's been running
about this winter and spring with Guy. Quite so! quite so! Oh, and by
the way, Sunshine, speaking of Whitelaw, Henry looked in on me this
morning. Ran over from New York about some business cropped up since
the sinking of the _Lusitania_."
"How is he?"
"Seems rather worried. Lost several intimate friends on the ship,
besides which the old question seems to be popping up again."
Mrs. Ansley sighed. "Oh, dear! I hope they'll not be dragged through
all that with another of their foolish clues. I thought it was over."
"It's over for Eleonora. But you know how Henry feels about it. Got it
on the brain. Pity, I call it, after--how many years is it?"
Mrs. Ansley computed. "It was while we were on our honeymoon. Don't you
remember? We read it in the paper at Montreal, after we'd come from
Niagara Falls. That was the fifteenth of May, and Harry had been stolen
on the tenth."
Tom felt a queer sick sinking of the heart. The tenth of May was the
last of the three dates his mother had fixed as his birthday. She had
told him, too, that the day when he was born was one on which the
nursemaids were in the Park, and the lilacs had been in bloom. Why this
specification? If, as she had informed him at other times, he was born
in the Bronx, where Gracie also had been born, why the reference to the
Park and nursemaids, five miles away? He listened avidly.
"How old would that make him if he were living now?"
Again Mrs. Ansley reckoned. "Something over nineteen. I've forgotten
just how many months he was when he disappeared."
Tom was reassured. He was only eighteen; he was positive of that. He
couldn't have been nineteen without ever suspecting it. Mr. Ansley
continued.
"Seems to me a great mistake to bring him back now, even if they found
him. A lumbering fellow of nineteen, practically a man, with probably
the lowest associations."
"That's what Onora feels. She's told me so. She couldn't go through it.
Even if he isn't dead in fact he's dead to them."
"Henry feels that, of course. He doesn't deny it. He doesn't want him
back--not now. At the same time when any new will o' the wisp starts up
he can't help feeling--"
Tom was back in his little hall bedroom, after the run in the car with
Guy, before he had time to think these scraps of conversation over.
The details for which he had to render an account were, first, his
sickening sense of dread on learning that the Whitelaw baby had been
stolen on the tenth of May, and, then, his relief that the child,
if now alive, would be nineteen years of age. These sensations or
emotions, whatever they might be called, had been independent of his
will. What did they portend? Why was he frightened in the one case, and
in the other comforted?
He didn't know. That he didn't know was the only decision he could
reach. Were the impossible ever to come true, were the parents of the
Whitelaw baby ever, no matter how unwillingly, to claim him as their
son, the advantages to him would be obvious. Why then did he hate the
idea? What was it in him that cried out, and pleaded not to be forsaken?
He didn't know.