to discover the parents of the child. She could have had no purpose
in doing so, I'll admit.... [Here he gave in detail the progress of
his investigations at the Foundlings' Home, at the health office,
at certain unsavory hospitals and in other channels of possibility.]
...At last, I found the doctor, and then the nurse. After that, it
was easy to unearth the records of a child's birth and of a mother's
death--all in New York City.... Droom can tell you the names of
Jane's parents, substantiating the names I have just given to you.
He did not know that they had been married nearly two years prior
to the birth of the child. It was a clandestine marriage.... I went
straight to the father of the foundling. He was then but little
more than twenty-one years of age--a wild, ruthless, overbearing,
heartless scoundrel, who had more money but a much smaller conscience
than I.... To-day he is a great and, I believe, respected gentleman,
for he comes of good stock.... I had him trembling on his knees
before me. He told me the truth. Egad, my son, I am rather proud
of that hour with him.

"It seems that this young scion of a wealthy house had lost his
insecure heart to the daughter of a real aristocrat. I say real,
because her father was a pure Knickerbocker of the old school.
He was, naturally, as poor as poverty itself. With his beautiful
daughter he was living in lower New York--barely subsisting,
I may say, on the meagre income that found its way to him through
the upstairs lodgers in the old home. Here lived Jane's mother,
cherishing the traditions of her blood, while her father, sick and
feeble, brooded over the days when he was a king in Babylon. The
handsome, wayward lover came into her life when she was nineteen.
They were married secretly in the city of Boston.