MARY ROGERS' LETTER TO EDITH.



tol( M rs. Westbrooke about my baby, and asked if I might
bring it and show it to her. You don't know how pretty she
was, with her golden-red hair curling all over her head, and her
sweet blue eyes. My lady got very fond of her the three days
she stayed with me, and, when 1 spoke of carrying it away, she
said:
  " ' I do not believe I can let baby go. It seems like my
own lost darling. WVill you let me have her'
  "'For your own ' I said, and she answered:
    'Yes, for my own.'
  "This was just what suited me,-to see my pet grow tip a
lady,-and I told her yes, and as the master did not oppose it
more than to say ' that he did not care especially for other
people's brats, and this one must be kept out of his way,' it
was settled that baby should stay, and I do believe my mistress
came to love it like her own. She gave it her lost baby's name,
and had it christened ' Gertrude Heloise Westbrooke,' so it
sure would have a name. She was a sweet-tempered lady,
but weak and nervous like. I think she had consumption, for
nothing in particular appeared to ail her, only she was tired like
all the time, and never could sleep nor get rested, and at last
she died, and left an annuity of forty pounds a year to little
Gertie, and said I was to have the care of her.
  "About a year after her death the master married a fashion-
able, fussy little woman from Glasgow, who dlisliked chil-
dren worse than he did, and never noticed Gertie in any way
after she found out that she was not Mir. Westbrooke's own.
I was about to be married myself, and asked the master if I
might have the child. He was more than willing, and so I took
her to my own comfortable home on the second floor of a house
in what is now Abingdon Road, but was then Newland Street.
All this time I had not been able to track you, though I
never went out that I (lid not look for you; and many's the time
I drew my little girl to the gardens of Kensington and even to
Hyde Park, where I sat by the hour watching the people as they
went by in hopes of seeing you. But I never did, and I had
almost given it up, when one day in October I went into a linen-



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