"Oh my," the old miner said, glancing over his wife's shoulder. "She looks just like her."

"Doesn't she?" his wife said softly, admiring the tiny baby. "Oh, she's beautiful!"

Wrapped in a blanket and held tightly by the old miner's wife was baby Jacqueline, a nearly exact replica of her mother. The dark hair, the cinnamon sprinkle freckles, the big, curious eyes…

"Where'd she get those blues?" the miner asked, leaning forward to look at the baby his wife was holding so tenderly. "I thought you said her mother had brown eyes…"

"She did. Dark brown, but just as big as this child's."

"Do we know the father?"

The wife shrugged and set the baby down in the little wooden cradle near the fire. She sighed. She hadn't used that in… oh, going on forty years now. How she missed having a child in the house…

"Well, I didn't get much out of her in those last breaths," the miner's wife said sadly, rubbing her hands together to keep warm. "Something of a Holmes…"

"Sherlock Holmes!" the miner cried, his eyes growing wide. "The great detective?"

"No, of course not!" his wife exclaimed, laughing and sitting down wearily in her rocking chair. "Sherlock Holmes. Goodness, Ronald, honestly."

"Well, it'd explain how she got those blue eyes," the miner said, nodding to the baby. "I've heard his eyes are like ice!"

"Hmm," his wife responded absentmindedly, picking up her sewing basket and looking for a needle.

"Ice to freeze those criminals in their tracks!" the old man went on.

"Please Ronald. Enough with this silly chatter."

"But it's true, Anna!"

"Nothing but gossip. Please Ronald, why subject yourself to such banter?" Anna said, brushing several grey strands of hair out of her face and moving closer to the candle. She squinted at the pants she was trying to mend. "We may just be common folk, but that doesn't mean we need to act like the rest of them."

The old miner shrugged and leaned back in his chair.

"Explain to me, just once more, how you came to find her. It still seems so out of the ordinary."

"Well," his wife began with a sigh, "her name was Jacqueline Devaroux, she said, and she had just come from her own father's house. Banished, I'd say. I met her on the street, sobbing. She was surely about to die."

"And you were coming home from the grocer's."

"Precisely. So obviously I had to help her. Ophelia Doolittle – she was just across the street, mind you – rushed over to help. We carefully carried her into Ophelia's house, and the baby was born. Jacqueline was sobbing, and cried to take the child away, back home where it would be safe. We tried to ask for information, something to find the father of the child, but all we got was 'Holmes', like I told you. And then the girl died. She looked to be hardly more than twenty, poor thing."

"Hm," was all Harold could say. He leaned back and chewed on the end of a toothpick. "And what do we do with the girl now?"

Anna shrugged. "Take her to the orphanage, I guess."

"We need to find her father."

"And how on earth are we supposed to do that?"

"We should get into contact with that Devaroux man, you know, Jacqueline's father. He'll know something, surely," Harold said.

"Now that's an idea," Anna said, standing up. "That's a good idea. My, Harold, you just seem to be getting smarter by the minute!"

The old miner just chuckled as his wife strode over to wear the baby girl was lying and gently picked her up.

"Don't worry, little one," she whispered, looking into the baby's crystal blue eyes. "We'll find your home. You'll never be alone."