Royal Ainsley leaned forward, and caught Mrs. Lester's arm, saying hastily:

"I repeat, that you shall have one hundred dollars if you will but give the child into my custody."

"Again I ask, what could you, a bachelor, do with it, Mr. Ainsley?" said Mrs. Lester.

He had an answer ready for her.

"I know a family who lost a little one, and would be only too delighted to take the infant and give it a good home."

Mrs. Lester breathed a sigh of relief.

"I am very poor, as you know very well, Mr. Ainsley," she answered, "and I can not refuse your kind offer. Take the little one with welcome. Only be sure that it is a good home you consign it to."

He counted out the money and handed it to her, and she resigned the infant to his arms. At that moment they heard the shriek of the incoming express.

"That is the train I was going to take," she said, "and now I am out the price of my ticket, which I bought in advance."

"If you will give it to me, I will use it," he said.

She handed him the ticket, and in another moment Mrs. Lester saw him board the train with the child.

"I wonder if I have done right or wrong," she thought, a scared look coming into her face. "It was all done so quickly that I had not the time to consider the matter. But this much I do know; I have the hundred dollars in my pocket, and that is a God-send to me. We need the money badly just now."

She turned and walked slowly away; but somehow she did not seem quite easy regarding the fate of the little child.

"I ought to have asked him the name of the family to whom he was going to take the baby," she mused; "then[188] I could have written to them to be very careful, and to bring her up to be a good and true woman. I shall certainly ask him all about it the very next time I see him—that is, if I ever do see him."

Meanwhile the train thundered on, carrying Royal Ainsley and the child away. It was hard to keep back the expression of mingled hatred and rage with which Royal Ainsley regarded the infant he held in his arms. He knew full well that the child was his own, but he had no love for it. If it had died then and there, that fact would have afforded him much satisfaction.

But one course presented itself. He would take it to New York, and once there, he would have no further trouble with it—he would manage to lose it. Many waifs were found on the doorsteps, and no one ever could trace their parentage, or whose hand had placed them there.

In all probability he would never run across Ida May again. She believed her child dead.

While these thoughts were flitting through his brain, the little one commenced to cry. Its piteous wails attracted the attention of more than one person in the car.

"Mother," said a buxom young woman sitting opposite, "I am sure that young man is a widower, left with the little child, and he is taking it to his folks. You see he is in deep mourning.

"I'll bet that baby's hungry, mother, and I'll bet, too, that he hasn't a nursing-bottle to feed it from."

"You can depend upon it that he has one," remarked her mother. "Every father knows that much abo............