ON THE OCEAN.

—Tennyson's "Princess."

—Hemans.

At dusk of the next day Paul Winans walked impatiently up and down the floor of his room at the Arlington House. He was waiting for the appearance of Keene, the best detective in the District, who had promised to meet him at six o'clock that evening, to report progress.

Norah had gone back to her suffering mistress the night before, and a vague report that had reached Winans to-day relative to Grace's illness weighed heavily on him, as, with clasped hands and a beating heart, he walked up and down, restlessly, striving with his agony.

Remorse was busy with his soul. In this great shock that had come upon him and his wife he lost sight of his own personal grievance, and thought only of her, forgetting his hot rage of two nights before, and thinking only that the breach his senseless jealousy had made between their two hearts was now immeasurably widened by the hand of fate. In some sort he felt himself an innocent agent in the child's loss, and scarcely dared hope for his wife's forgiveness.

"Come in," he said, pausing, as a knock echoed on the door with military precision. "Ah! Fontenay, is it you? I expected Keene, the detective. Come in—sit down."

Captain Fontenay did as requested, turning a silent look of commiseration on his friend.

"I have just come from calling on Miss Clendenon," he observed, "and learned that Mrs. Conway has not yet returned from Mrs. Winans' hotel. In fact, I believe she thinks best to remain with her until she gets better. She has, as Miss Lulu informed me, taken rooms for herself, and Miss Clendenon, of course, who is to rejoin her there this evening—Conway remaining at his hotel."

"Ah! that is kind of Mrs. Conway," said Winans, surprisedly. "I should not have expected so much kind feeling from one who has always appeared to me a mere cold-hearted devotee of fashion and pleasure."

"The devil is not as black as he is painted," the captain quotes, sententiously.

"This Miss Clendenon seems a pleasant, or rather, a sweet little creature," mused the Senator, aloud; "one of the sort of women, I think—don't you?—who is worthy the devoted affection of any one."

"I think so," says the captain, with enthusiasm.

"I was thinking"—musingly this—"that I would like her to know my wife—like to see a cordial friendship grow up between the two. Grace has never had an intimate female friend. She is singularly quiet, reticent, and reserved with every one. It would, I think, be something of a comfort to her to be brought into familiar intercourse with Willard Clendenon's sister. She needs the sympathy and society of one of her own sex."

"Let us hope they may become friends," says the captain, heartily.

"But, Fontenay, this illness of Grace—I heard a rumor of it to-day—our unfortunate affairs are by this time a town-talk. She is not seriously out of sorts, I presume, and I am not brave enough to go there now, and look on the desolation I have wrought."

Fontenay walked across the room and laid his hand on the other's arm, gravely and sympathizingly.

"No—yes," he says; "well, the truth is, Winans, I hate to be the bearer of the tidings, but the fact is simply this: Mrs. Winans' excessive agitation and grief have culminated in what the physician calls a serious attack of brain fever."

"Great Heaven! what have I done?"

The strong man reeled backward as if from a blow just as another professional rap sounded on the door.

"Come in," he says, with a strong effort at self-control.

This time it was Keene. Slender, small, and shrewd-looking, he fits his name, and his name fits him. He bows to both gentlemen, leisurely taking the seat he is offered.

"Anything new?" he is asked.

"A moment, if you please. Senator, if you will be so kind as to order up the chamber-maid who attends the ladies' parlors on this floor, I will ask her a few questions."

Winans rang the bell violently.

"You do not suppose she has stolen the child?" he queries, a little astonished.

"Not at all," Mr. Keene smiled cheerfully back.

A white-aproned waiter answered the bell just then, Winans gave the desired order, and resumed his moody walk again, until interrupted by the entrance of the maid he had summoned. A rather pretty and pleasant-faced girl she was, neatly dressed, and with a due modicum of modesty, for the color came into her smooth, round cheek, and she looked down and trifled with her apron-string as Mr. Keene smiled approval at her.

"What is your name, my girl?"

"Annie Brady, sir."

"Ah, yes. Well, Miss Annie, you preside over the ladies' rooms on this floor? Attend to the ladies, I mean?"

"Oh! yes, sir."

"Well, Annie, I have heard—you can tell me if it is true—did any of the ladies you have been waiting on in this hotel leave here yesterday for a foreign port?"

The pretty Irish girl reflected.

"Yes, sir," with a small courtesy; "and indade I believe there was wan."

"You believe. Are you quite certain?"

"Yes, sir, I am quite certain. It were the poor English lady whose room was opposite this one—number 20, sir."

She half-opened the door and indicated number 20 with her finger.

"Just across the hall."

"The poor English lady; and why do you call her poor?" asked the detective, curiously, while the two gentlemen listened in silence, and the girl herself edged nearer the door in surprise and bewilderment commingled. "Was she in bad circumstances?"

"Why, no, sir, not that way; she seemed quite comfortable so far as money went. It were her mind, sir," said the girl, tapping her forehead significantly. "She seemed not quite right here, sir."

"And what sort of a lady was she, and what was her name?"

"Her name? It was Mrs. Moreland, sir, and she looked about thirty year old—a pretty little blue-eyed lady, quite broken down with trouble and grief. She came on here a few days ago from New York, and was going home to her friends in London."

"Ah! and was she alone? Did she talk with you much, and tell you the cause of her trouble?"

"She did talk to me sometimes. She seemed lonely and unsettled-like, and I thought it did her good to talk to some wan of her trials. A sore heart, ye know, sir, is all the betther for telling its griefs over to a sympathizing heart," said Annie, apologetically.

"Yes," said Keene, a little impatiently, "but you have not told us what her trouble was."

"To be sure," answered Annie, good-humoredly. "She had come over some two years since from London with her husband to seek a better fortune, and just when they were so snugly settled down in a dear little home in Brooklyn, and beginning to do well in the world, and wan little baby-bird come to make sunshine in the home, the husband and baby sickened and died, wan after the other, sir, and the poor heart-broken widdy is just going back to her friends almost crazy with the grief of it all," concluded Annie, quite breathless with her long speech.

A sparkle of blue lightning flashed in Keene's eyes.

"She had lost a child, you said?"

"Yes, sir, a pretty boy, scarce a year old. She showed me a photograph of them all—five little ones she had lost, he the last of them all—black-eyed, curly-headed little beauties they were—like their poor father, she said."

"And she was inconsolable at the loss of the baby?"

"Yes, sir; she fretted for it all the long days, sir—not quite right in her head, she was not, I know, but," said Annie, wiping away a glittering tear from her pink cheek, "it were pitiful like to see her a tossing on the sofa, and moaning, and like as not laughing wildly as she talked of baby Earle, as she called him."

"Seemed insane, you think?" asked Keene, in his quick, short manner.

"Not like that," answered Annie, with mild wonder at the gentleman's pertinacious curiosity, "but a little out of her mind—you've heard of people being melancholy mad, sir."

"Yes, oh, yes," said Keene, "and so you said good-by to this interesting little widow yesterday at about between eleven and twelve o'clock, and she left here and took the steamer for Liverpool?"

"She did go away at that time, sir, but I told her good-by earlier as my duties called me to another part of the building. She told nobody good-by. Indeed, all the waiters in the house—she always had a kind word for them, ye see—they all wondered they did not see her go out, and so missed saying good-by to her."

"But her baggage, Annie? How did her baggage go down?"

"Oh! her passage was taken, and her baggage sent to the steamer, yesterday."

"Yes; thank you, Miss Annie, and I believe that is all I want to ask you this evening."

Senator Winans supplemented Keene's thanks with a banknote, and Annie went bowing and smiling back to the regions whence she came.

The three men looked at each other, Keene breaking the ominous silence that had fallen:

"This is what I came to tell you, Senator Winans. Mrs. Moreland is on the ocean with your little boy. I have already telegraphed to Liverpool to have her stopped when she lands there. I have found that a woman answering her description left on the steamer yesterday with a child answering the description of yours; with the cunning of insanity that poor creature probably saw the child at the moment of leaving, and kidnapped it with the thought that it was her own."

He turned away, inured as he was to sorrow, from the white anguish of the father's face.

"It is very probable you will get him back; don't give up all as lost," he said, cheerfully.

"I will not," the stern energy of the man asserting itself. "We will follow them on the next steamer, and track every inch of ground till we find him. Every dollar I own shall be expended if necessary. But, oh, Heaven! I cannot—his mother—she is ill, wretched—perhaps death-stricken. I dare not leave here."

"I don't know that it is necessary to follow them," Keene said, doubtfully. "If they get him in Liverpool, he can be sent home in the captain's care. You will not care, I suppose, to punish her. She is probably half insane, and under a natural hallucination that it was her own, and abducted it."

"No, poor creature! she has already suffered enough," said Winans, pityingly.

"Ah, by the way, Winans," here interposed the captain, "why not call and see your wife to-night, and learn if her illness is too serious to admit of your leaving; she may be better, and you at liberty to go. It seems the best thing under the circumstances, in my humble judgment, that you should pursue this woman as speedily as is possible."

"Perhaps so. Then, Mr. Keene, I suppose we can do nothing more till to-morrow. If you will call on me at an early hour in the morning we will discuss the best steps to be taken in the matter."

And there being no more to say on the subject, the detective bowed himself out, leaving the two friends alone together.

"Fontenay, I am afraid to go to her. She would spurn me from her presence; I deserve it."

He strode across the room, and began stirring the coal fire, shaking down the ashes, and tearing open its burning heart, just as wounded love and bitter pain and yearning were sweeping the ashes of pride and jealousy from his, and showing him the living fire that burned undimmed below.

"You can but try," said the gallant captain. "'Faint heart never won fair lady.'"

And Winans resolved to "try."