"You will recall that I would have permitted you to marry her--I mean, in the beginning. Perhaps it was spite which interposed later on. At least, be charitable enough to call it that. Clegg has been here to see me. He says you are bound to make Jane Cable your wife. I knew you would. For a long time I have held out, unreasonably, I admit, against having her as my daughter. I could not endure the thought of giving you up altogether. Don't you comprehend my thought? I cannot bring myself to look again into her eyes after what she saw in this accursed prison.... She was born in wedlock.... The story is not a long one. Elias Droom knows the names of her father and mother, but I am confident that he does not know all of the circumstances. For once, I was too shrewd for him. The story of my dealings in connection with Jane Cable is a shameful one, and I cannot hope for pardon, either from you or from her."
Here he related, as concisely as possible, the incidents attending Mrs. Cable's first visit to his office and the subsequent adoption of the babe.
"I knew that there was wealth and power behind the mystery. There was a profitable scandal in the background. Unknown to Mrs. Cable, I began investigations of my own. She had made little or no effort 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.