Oh! it was easy, fatally easy, to recognize the answer to her petition! The noise subsided as Esther noiselessly pattered over to it, and from an end of its roll of flannel a bright head projected. Esther picked it up and beat a hasty retreat unobserved by the workers at the bedside. Down the dark stairs she passed with her burden, and into the drawing-room again. She snuggled down beside it in her crib and for a few ecstatic moments held it in her arms. The clock struck four, and, as Esther quivered and listened still for the descent of the doctor, the baby raised up its voice again in one prolonged and breathless yell. Jacob was beside the crib in an instant and had his daughter in his arms.
"What is it?" he questioned wildly. "Where is it? What hurt thee?" And then his heart too skipped a beat, for he found that though he had Esther in his arms he had left her voice in the crib.
"It ain't me," she finally managed to assure him. "It's mine little brother what I gets out of the Central Park."
Lights, Mrs. Moriarty, explanations, and expostulations followed.
"I tells that Stork," Esther ended, "I tells him I ain't got no families und no aunties, und I needs a baby, und I has a bed ready. It _is_ mine baby. Storks is crazy fools!"
But the inexorable John Nolan set out upon his mission of restitution. Esther, puzzled, heart-broken, argumentative, sped on before, and reached, not without some skirmishing, the side of the golden-haired lady, while her father was still struggling with the darkness and his unaccustomed burden.
And then the miracles began. The lady heard a step upon the stairs and a great radiance fell upon her. Wonder, incredulity, and joy shone in her lovely eyes. The doctor's hand was on her wrist. The nurse's admonitions were in her ears. But she raised herself among her pillows and watched the turn of the stairs where a shaft of light streamed through the open door.
Esther's father came out of the darkness, and the lady wrenched her hand from the doctor and stretched both her arms toward the oncoming figure, and "Jacob," said she, and quite gently fainted into the doctor's arms.
"No excitement, no fuss," commanded that authority. "She's all right, coming round in a minute. Here, stand there. Speak naturally to her. There, she's coming now."
