had never gone aboard the vessel.

"The nurse had had some personal business to attend to before
going aboard, and in order to save time had taken Mabel with her.
In some inexplicable manner Mabel had strayed from her side. She
had made frantic search for the child and finally, not daring to
go to us with the truth, had conceived the idea of making us
believe that she had taken Mabel aboard the ship. She had bribed
the purser, a Frenchman whom she knew, to corroborate her story,
and had succeeded in her treacherous design.

"She wrote that she had longed over and over again to confess the
truth, but had not dared to do so. She had heart trouble, she
said, and her days were numbered. Therefore she felt that she must
confess the truth before it became too late.

"You can imagine," said Mrs. Allison, "the effect this letter had
upon me. For fourteen years I had mourned my child as dead. It
seemed infinitely worse to hear that she had not died then, but
was perhaps alive, and in what circumstances?

"The day I received the letter I took the train for the east,
wiring the Gibsons to meet me, and aided by them engaged the best
detective service upon the case. There was little or nothing to
furnish us with a clue, for the nurse's lying statement had misled
us; we were out at sea before we knew positively that Mabel had
disappeared, and my long illness in Europe, followed by my
husband's death kept me from instituting a thorough search of New
York City.