CHAPTER XLIV.

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 about babies."

"Of course he has it in his pocket; he never came away without one; but he is so deeply engrossed in his own thoughts that he does not hear the baby. Don't you think you ought to give him a little reminder of it?" said her daughter, thoughtfully. "You're an elderly woman, and can do it."

"He might tell me to mind my own business," said the elder woman. "Some strangers don't take kindly to other people meddling in their affairs."

[189]

As the plaintive wails of the infant increased instead of diminished, the elder woman got up and made her way up the aisle.

Royal Ainsley started violently as he felt the heavy hand on his shoulder.

"Why don't you feed your baby, sir?" she said, brusquely.

He looked at her angrily, his brows bent together in a decided frown.

"What do you mean by interrupting my thoughts, woman?" he cried, harshly.

His angry retort roused all the antagonism in the woman's nature.

"I mean just what I say—your baby's hungry, mister," she replied. "If you had the feelings of a loving father, you'd know enough to feed it."

He looked at her in consternation.

"Feed it?" he echoed, blankly. "I—I was not prepared for anything like this. Such a thing did not occur to me."

"And you didn't bring a nursing-bottle along with you?" echoed the woman.

"No," he responded, curtly, but also somewhat blankly.

"Good Lord! that's just like a man, to forget important things like that."

"What am I to do?" he asked, appealingly. "What would you suggest, madame. I am at sea."

She looked at him perplexedly; then her motherly face brightened as she glanced about the car.

"I will soon see what can be done," she answered, making her way as quickly as the moving train would allow to the end of the car, where two women sat with tiny infants on their laps.

Very soon she returned with the article she had gone in search of.

"Let me take the poor little thing," she said, "and feed it. Men, and more especially young men, don't know anything about such things."

Royal Ainsley gladly delivered his charge into her keeping. Very soon the woman had stilled its cries, and[190] it was sleeping peacefully in her arms. An idea then came to Royal Ainsley. His pale-blue eyes glittered with a fiendish light.

He almost laughed aloud at the thought that flashed through his mind.

"Do you think the baby will sleep a little while?" he asked, drawing his hat down over his face.

"It is likely to," she answered; "still, one can not always tell. Samantha, my daughter here, never slept ten minutes on a stretch when she was a baby. She was a lot of trouble to me then; but I don't mind it now, for she's a heap of comfort to me, sir. I wouldn't know how to get along without Samantha. She——"

Royal Ainsley interrupted her impatiently.

"I was going to say that if you would be kind enough to hold the little one for awhile I would like to go into the smoking-car and smoke a cigar."