As the details of getting ready multiplied about him, Varney's interest
in his novel undertaking imperceptibly grew. The thing had come upon him
so unexpectedly that it had not yet by any means lost its strangeness.
To the old friend of his mother's girlhood, Elbert Carstairs, he was
sincerely devoted, though knowing him for an indulgent man whose
indulgences were chiefly of himself. But when, responding to his excited
summons that night, he had sat and listened while Mr. Carstairs unfolded
his mad little domestic plot, he had been first utterly amazed and then
utterly repelled. And it was not until a final sense of the old man's
genuine need was borne in upon him, of his loneliness, his helplessness,
and his entire dependence upon him, Varney, that he had consented to
undertake the extraordinary commission.

In a sense, it was all simply preposterous. Here was he, Laurence
Varney, in sane mind, of law-abiding habits and hitherto of tolerable
standing in the community, solemnly pledged to go and steal the person
of a child, in defiance and contempt of the statutes of all known
nations. And the place where this lawless deed was to be done was not
Ruritania or the hazy dominions of Prince Otto, but a commonplace,
humdrum American town, not an hour and a half from his office chair by
the expresses.

In going about this task he was to conduct himself with the frankness
and straightforwardness of a sneak-thief. Not a soul in New York was to
know where he had gone. Not a soul in Hunston must dimly suspect what he
had come for. It must be gum-shoe work from start to finish, and the
_Cypriani's_ motto would be the inspiring word, "Sh-h-h." Though he had
to find a nondescript child whom he did not know from Eve, he was
forbidden to do it in a natural, easy, and dashing way. He could not
ring her mother's door-bell, ask for her, throw a meal-sack over her